Consistent Video Saliency Using Local Gradient Flow Optimization and Global Refinement

We present a novel spatiotemporal saliency detection method to estimate salient regions in videos based on the gradient flow field and energy optimization. The proposed gradient flow field incorporates two distinctive features: 1) intra-frame boundary information and 2) inter-frame motion information together for indicating the salient regions. Based on the effective utilization of both intra-frame and inter-frame information in the gradient flow field, our algorithm is robust enough to estimate the object and background in complex scenes with various motion patterns and appearances. Then, we introduce local as well as global contrast saliency measures using the foreground and background information estimated from the gradient flow field. These enhanced contrast saliency cues uniformly highlight an entire object. We further propose a new energy function to encourage the spatiotemporal consistency of the output saliency maps, which is seldom explored in previous video saliency methods. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art video saliency detection methods

Video Saliency Detection by 3D Convolutional Neural Networks

Different from salient object detection methods for still images, a key challenging for video saliency detection is how to extract and combine spatial and temporal features. In this paper, we present a novel and effective approach for salient object detection for video sequences based on 3D convolutional neural networks. First, we design a 3D convolutional network (Conv3DNet) with the input as three video frame to learn the spatiotemporal features for video sequences. Then, we design a 3D deconvolutional network (Deconv3DNet) to combine the spatiotemporal features to predict the final saliency map for video sequences. Experimental results show that the proposed saliency detection model performs better in video saliency prediction compared with the state-of-the-art video saliency detection methods