Unsupervised Joint Salient Region Detection and Object Segmentation

International audienceThis paper presents a novel unsupervised algorithm to detect salient regions and to segment out foreground objects from background. In contrast to previous unidirectional saliency-based object segmentation methods, in which only the detected saliency map is used to guide the object segmentation, our algorithm mutually exploits detection/segmentation cues from each other. To achieve this goal, an initial saliency map is generated by the proposed segmentation driven low-rank matrix recovery model. Such a saliency map is exploited to initialize object segmentation model, which is formulated as energy minimization of Markov random field. Mutually, the quality of saliency map is further improved by the segmentation result, and serves as a new guidance for the object segmentation. The optimal saliency map and the final segmentation are achieved by jointly optimizing the defined objective functions. Extensive evaluations on MSRA-B and PASCAL-1500 datasets demonstrate that the proposed algorithm achieves the state-of-the-art performance for both the salient region detection and the object segmentation