3,044 research outputs found
New characterizations of minimum spanning trees and of saliency maps based on quasi-flat zones
We study three representations of hierarchies of partitions: dendrograms
(direct representations), saliency maps, and minimum spanning trees. We provide
a new bijection between saliency maps and hierarchies based on quasi-flat zones
as used in image processing and characterize saliency maps and minimum spanning
trees as solutions to constrained minimization problems where the constraint is
quasi-flat zones preservation. In practice, these results form a toolkit for
new hierarchical methods where one can choose the most convenient
representation. They also invite us to process non-image data with
morphological hierarchies
Saliency maps on image hierarchies
© 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
In this paper we propose two saliency models for salient object segmentation based on a hierarchical image segmentation, a tree-like structure that represents regions at different scales from the details to the whole image (e.g. gPb-UCM, BPT). The first model is based on a hierarchy of image partitions. The saliency at each level is computed on a region basis, taking into account the contrast between regions. The maps obtained for the different partitions are then integrated into a final saliency map. The second model directly works on the structure created by the segmentation algorithm, computing saliency at each node and integrating these cues in a straightforward manner into a single saliency map. We show that the proposed models produce high quality saliency maps. Objective evaluation demonstrates that the two methods achieve state-of-the-art performance in several benchmark datasets.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
Hierarchical image simplification and segmentation based on Mumford-Shah-salient level line selection
Hierarchies, such as the tree of shapes, are popular representations for
image simplification and segmentation thanks to their multiscale structures.
Selecting meaningful level lines (boundaries of shapes) yields to simplify
image while preserving intact salient structures. Many image simplification and
segmentation methods are driven by the optimization of an energy functional,
for instance the celebrated Mumford-Shah functional. In this paper, we propose
an efficient approach to hierarchical image simplification and segmentation
based on the minimization of the piecewise-constant Mumford-Shah functional.
This method conforms to the current trend that consists in producing
hierarchical results rather than a unique partition. Contrary to classical
approaches which compute optimal hierarchical segmentations from an input
hierarchy of segmentations, we rely on the tree of shapes, a unique and
well-defined representation equivalent to the image. Simply put, we compute for
each level line of the image an attribute function that characterizes its
persistence under the energy minimization. Then we stack the level lines from
meaningless ones to salient ones through a saliency map based on extinction
values defined on the tree-based shape space. Qualitative illustrations and
quantitative evaluation on Weizmann segmentation evaluation database
demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our method.Comment: Pattern Recognition Letters, Elsevier, 201
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
On the equivalence between hierarchical segmentations and ultrametric watersheds
We study hierarchical segmentation in the framework of edge-weighted graphs.
We define ultrametric watersheds as topological watersheds null on the minima.
We prove that there exists a bijection between the set of ultrametric
watersheds and the set of hierarchical segmentations. We end this paper by
showing how to use the proposed framework in practice in the example of
constrained connectivity; in particular it allows to compute such a hierarchy
following a classical watershed-based morphological scheme, which provides an
efficient algorithm to compute the whole hierarchy.Comment: 19 pages, double-colum
Objects predict fixations better than early saliency
Humans move their eyes while looking at scenes and pictures. Eye movements correlate with shifts in attention and are thought to be a consequence of optimal resource allocation for high-level tasks such as visual recognition. Models of attention, such as âsaliency maps,â are often built on the assumption that âearlyâ features (color, contrast, orientation, motion, and so forth) drive attention directly. We explore an alternative hypothesis: Observers attend to âinterestingâ objects. To test this hypothesis, we measure the eye position of human observers while they inspect photographs of common natural
scenes. Our observers perform different tasks: artistic evaluation, analysis of content, and search. Immediately after each presentation, our observers are asked to name objects they saw. Weighted with recall frequency, these objects predict fixations in individual images better than early saliency, irrespective of task. Also, saliency combined with object positions predicts which objects are frequently named. This suggests that early saliency has only an indirect effect on attention, acting
through recognized objects. Consequently, rather than treating attention as mere preprocessing step for object recognition, models of both need to be integrated
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