A unified approach to salient object detection via low rank matrix recovery

Salient object detection is not a pure low-level, bottom-up process. Higher-level knowledge is important even for task-independent image saliency. We propose a unified model to incorporate traditional low-level features with higher-level guidance to detect salient objects. In our model, an image is represented as a low-rank matrix plus sparse noises in a certain feature space, where the non-salient regions (or background) can be explained by the low-rank matrix, and the salient regions are indicated by the sparse noises. To ensure the validity of this model, a linear transform for the feature space is introduced and needs to be learned. Given an image, its low-level saliency is then extracted by identifying…

• NS
  National Science Foundation
• AR
  Army Research Office
• AR
  Army Research Laboratory