5,239 research outputs found
Saliency Benchmarking Made Easy: Separating Models, Maps and Metrics
Dozens of new models on fixation prediction are published every year and
compared on open benchmarks such as MIT300 and LSUN. However, progress in the
field can be difficult to judge because models are compared using a variety of
inconsistent metrics. Here we show that no single saliency map can perform well
under all metrics. Instead, we propose a principled approach to solve the
benchmarking problem by separating the notions of saliency models, maps and
metrics. Inspired by Bayesian decision theory, we define a saliency model to be
a probabilistic model of fixation density prediction and a saliency map to be a
metric-specific prediction derived from the model density which maximizes the
expected performance on that metric given the model density. We derive these
optimal saliency maps for the most commonly used saliency metrics (AUC, sAUC,
NSS, CC, SIM, KL-Div) and show that they can be computed analytically or
approximated with high precision. We show that this leads to consistent
rankings in all metrics and avoids the penalties of using one saliency map for
all metrics. Our method allows researchers to have their model compete on many
different metrics with state-of-the-art in those metrics: "good" models will
perform well in all metrics.Comment: published at ECCV 201
On the Distribution of Salient Objects in Web Images and its Influence on Salient Object Detection
It has become apparent that a Gaussian center bias can serve as an important
prior for visual saliency detection, which has been demonstrated for predicting
human eye fixations and salient object detection. Tseng et al. have shown that
the photographer's tendency to place interesting objects in the center is a
likely cause for the center bias of eye fixations. We investigate the influence
of the photographer's center bias on salient object detection, extending our
previous work. We show that the centroid locations of salient objects in
photographs of Achanta and Liu's data set in fact correlate strongly with a
Gaussian model. This is an important insight, because it provides an empirical
motivation and justification for the integration of such a center bias in
salient object detection algorithms and helps to understand why Gaussian models
are so effective. To assess the influence of the center bias on salient object
detection, we integrate an explicit Gaussian center bias model into two
state-of-the-art salient object detection algorithms. This way, first, we
quantify the influence of the Gaussian center bias on pixel- and segment-based
salient object detection. Second, we improve the performance in terms of F1
score, Fb score, area under the recall-precision curve, area under the receiver
operating characteristic curve, and hit-rate on the well-known data set by
Achanta and Liu. Third, by debiasing Cheng et al.'s region contrast model, we
exemplarily demonstrate that implicit center biases are partially responsible
for the outstanding performance of state-of-the-art algorithms. Last but not
least, as a result of debiasing Cheng et al.'s algorithm, we introduce a
non-biased salient object detection method, which is of interest for
applications in which the image data is not likely to have a photographer's
center bias (e.g., image data of surveillance cameras or autonomous robots)
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