Learning Optimal Seeds for Diffusion-Based Salient Object Detection

In diffusion-based saliency detection, an image is parti-tioned into superpixels and mapped to a graph, with super-pixels as nodes and edge strengths proportional to super-pixel similarity. Saliency information is then propagated over the graph using a diffusion process, whose equilibrium state yields the object saliency map. The optimal solution is the product of a propagation matrix and a saliency seed vector that contains a prior saliency assessment. This is obtained from either a bottom-up saliency detector or some heuristics. In this work, we propose a method to learn op-timal seeds for object saliency. Two types of features are computed per superpixel: the bottom-up saliency of the su-perpixel region and a set of mid-level vision features infor-mative of how likely the superpixel is to belong to an object. The combination of features that best discriminates between object and background saliency is then learned, using a large-margin formulation of the discriminant saliency prin-ciple. The propagation of the resulting saliency seeds, using a diffusion process, is finally shown to outperform the state of the art on a number of salient object detection datasets. 1

Robust Correlation Tracking for UAV Videos via Feature Fusion and Saliency Proposals

Following the growing availability of low-cost, commercially available unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), more and more research efforts have been focusing on object tracking using videos recorded from UAVs. However, tracking from UAV videos poses many challenges due to platform motion, including background clutter, occlusion, and illumination variation. This paper tackles these challenges by proposing a correlation filter-based tracker with feature fusion and saliency proposals. First, we integrate multiple feature types such as dimensionality-reduced color name (CN) and histograms of oriented gradient (HOG) features to improve the performance of correlation filters for UAV videos. Yet, a fused feature acting as a multivector descriptor cannot be directly used in prior correlation filters. Therefore, a fused feature correlation filter is proposed that can directly convolve with a multivector descriptor, in order to obtain a single-channel response that indicates the location of an object. Furthermore, we introduce saliency proposals as re-detector to reduce background interference caused by occlusion or any distracter. Finally, an adaptive template-update strategy according to saliency information is utilized to alleviate possible model drifts. Systematic comparative evaluations performed on two popular UAV datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed approach