Visual Saliency Based on Multiscale Deep Features

Visual saliency is a fundamental problem in both cognitive and computational sciences, including computer vision. In this CVPR 2015 paper, we discover that a high-quality visual saliency model can be trained with multiscale features extracted using a popular deep learning architecture, convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which have had many successes in visual recognition tasks. For learning such saliency models, we introduce a neural network architecture, which has fully connected layers on top of CNNs responsible for extracting features at three different scales. We then propose a refinement method to enhance the spatial coherence of our saliency results. Finally, aggregating multiple saliency maps computed for different levels of image segmentation can further boost the performance, yielding saliency maps better than those generated from a single segmentation. To promote further research and evaluation of visual saliency models, we also construct a new large database of 4447 challenging images and their pixelwise saliency annotation. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method is capable of achieving state-of-the-art performance on all public benchmarks, improving the F-Measure by 5.0% and 13.2% respectively on the MSRA-B dataset and our new dataset (HKU-IS), and lowering the mean absolute error by 5.7% and 35.1% respectively on these two datasets.Comment: To appear in CVPR 201

Vision-based Real-Time Aerial Object Localization and Tracking for UAV Sensing System

The paper focuses on the problem of vision-based obstacle detection and tracking for unmanned aerial vehicle navigation. A real-time object localization and tracking strategy from monocular image sequences is developed by effectively integrating the object detection and tracking into a dynamic Kalman model. At the detection stage, the object of interest is automatically detected and localized from a saliency map computed via the image background connectivity cue at each frame; at the tracking stage, a Kalman filter is employed to provide a coarse prediction of the object state, which is further refined via a local detector incorporating the saliency map and the temporal information between two consecutive frames. Compared to existing methods, the proposed approach does not require any manual initialization for tracking, runs much faster than the state-of-the-art trackers of its kind, and achieves competitive tracking performance on a large number of image sequences. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and superior performance of the proposed approach.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figure