Salient Object Detection in Video using Deep Non-Local Neural Networks

Detection of salient objects in image and video is of great importance in many computer vision applications. In spite of the fact that the state of the art in saliency detection for still images has been changed substantially over the last few years, there have been few improvements in video saliency detection. This paper investigates the use of recently introduced non-local neural networks in video salient object detection. Non-local neural networks are applied to capture global dependencies and hence determine the salient objects. The effect of non-local operations is studied separately on static and dynamic saliency detection in order to exploit both appearance and motion features. A novel deep non-local neural network architecture is introduced for video salient object detection and tested on two well-known datasets DAVIS and FBMS. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art video saliency detection methods.Comment: Submitted to Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representatio

Graph-Theoretic Spatiotemporal Context Modeling for Video Saliency Detection

As an important and challenging problem in computer vision, video saliency detection is typically cast as a spatiotemporal context modeling problem over consecutive frames. As a result, a key issue in video saliency detection is how to effectively capture the intrinsical properties of atomic video structures as well as their associated contextual interactions along the spatial and temporal dimensions. Motivated by this observation, we propose a graph-theoretic video saliency detection approach based on adaptive video structure discovery, which is carried out within a spatiotemporal atomic graph. Through graph-based manifold propagation, the proposed approach is capable of effectively modeling the semantically contextual interactions among atomic video structures for saliency detection while preserving spatial smoothness and temporal consistency. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach over several benchmark datasets.Comment: ICIP 201

Recurrent Mixture Density Network for Spatiotemporal Visual Attention

In many computer vision tasks, the relevant information to solve the problem at hand is mixed to irrelevant, distracting information. This has motivated researchers to design attentional models that can dynamically focus on parts of images or videos that are salient, e.g., by down-weighting irrelevant pixels. In this work, we propose a spatiotemporal attentional model that learns where to look in a video directly from human fixation data. We model visual attention with a mixture of Gaussians at each frame. This distribution is used to express the probability of saliency for each pixel. Time consistency in videos is modeled hierarchically by: 1) deep 3D convolutional features to represent spatial and short-term time relations and 2) a long short-term memory network on top that aggregates the clip-level representation of sequential clips and therefore expands the temporal domain from few frames to seconds. The parameters of the proposed model are optimized via maximum likelihood estimation using human fixations as training data, without knowledge of the action in each video. Our experiments on Hollywood2 show state-of-the-art performance on saliency prediction for video. We also show that our attentional model trained on Hollywood2 generalizes well to UCF101 and it can be leveraged to improve action classification accuracy on both datasets.Comment: ICLR 201

Global and Local Sensitivity Guided Key Salient Object Re-augmentation for Video Saliency Detection

The existing still-static deep learning based saliency researches do not consider the weighting and highlighting of extracted features from different layers, all features contribute equally to the final saliency decision-making. Such methods always evenly detect all "potentially significant regions" and unable to highlight the key salient object, resulting in detection failure of dynamic scenes. In this paper, based on the fact that salient areas in videos are relatively small and concentrated, we propose a \textbf{key salient object re-augmentation method (KSORA) using top-down semantic knowledge and bottom-up feature guidance} to improve detection accuracy in video scenes. KSORA includes two sub-modules (WFE and KOS): WFE processes local salient feature selection using bottom-up strategy, while KOS ranks each object in global fashion by top-down statistical knowledge, and chooses the most critical object area for local enhancement. The proposed KSORA can not only strengthen the saliency value of the local key salient object but also ensure global saliency consistency. Results on three benchmark datasets suggest that our model has the capability of improving the detection accuracy on complex scenes. The significant performance of KSORA, with a speed of 17FPS on modern GPUs, has been verified by comparisons with other ten state-of-the-art algorithms.Comment: 6 figures, 10 page

SG-FCN: A Motion and Memory-Based Deep Learning Model for Video Saliency Detection

Data-driven saliency detection has attracted strong interest as a result of applying convolutional neural networks to the detection of eye fixations. Although a number of imagebased salient object and fixation detection models have been proposed, video fixation detection still requires more exploration. Different from image analysis, motion and temporal information is a crucial factor affecting human attention when viewing video sequences. Although existing models based on local contrast and low-level features have been extensively researched, they failed to simultaneously consider interframe motion and temporal information across neighboring video frames, leading to unsatisfactory performance when handling complex scenes. To this end, we propose a novel and efficient video eye fixation detection model to improve the saliency detection performance. By simulating the memory mechanism and visual attention mechanism of human beings when watching a video, we propose a step-gained fully convolutional network by combining the memory information on the time axis with the motion information on the space axis while storing the saliency information of the current frame. The model is obtained through hierarchical training, which ensures the accuracy of the detection. Extensive experiments in comparison with 11 state-of-the-art methods are carried out, and the results show that our proposed model outperforms all 11 methods across a number of publicly available datasets

Video Salient Object Detection Using Spatiotemporal Deep Features

This paper presents a method for detecting salient objects in videos where temporal information in addition to spatial information is fully taken into account. Following recent reports on the advantage of deep features over conventional hand-crafted features, we propose a new set of SpatioTemporal Deep (STD) features that utilize local and global contexts over frames. We also propose new SpatioTemporal Conditional Random Field (STCRF) to compute saliency from STD features. STCRF is our extension of CRF to the temporal domain and describes the relationships among neighboring regions both in a frame and over frames. STCRF leads to temporally consistent saliency maps over frames, contributing to the accurate detection of salient objects' boundaries and noise reduction during detection. Our proposed method first segments an input video into multiple scales and then computes a saliency map at each scale level using STD features with STCRF. The final saliency map is computed by fusing saliency maps at different scale levels. Our experiments, using publicly available benchmark datasets, confirm that the proposed method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods. We also applied our saliency computation to the video object segmentation task, showing that our method outperforms existing video object segmentation methods.Comment: accepted at TI

A Review of Co-saliency Detection Technique: Fundamentals, Applications, and Challenges

Co-saliency detection is a newly emerging and rapidly growing research area in computer vision community. As a novel branch of visual saliency, co-saliency detection refers to the discovery of common and salient foregrounds from two or more relevant images, and can be widely used in many computer vision tasks. The existing co-saliency detection algorithms mainly consist of three components: extracting effective features to represent the image regions, exploring the informative cues or factors to characterize co-saliency, and designing effective computational frameworks to formulate co-saliency. Although numerous methods have been developed, the literature is still lacking a deep review and evaluation of co-saliency detection techniques. In this paper, we aim at providing a comprehensive review of the fundamentals, challenges, and applications of co-saliency detection. Specifically, we provide an overview of some related computer vision works, review the history of co-saliency detection, summarize and categorize the major algorithms in this research area, discuss some open issues in this area, present the potential applications of co-saliency detection, and finally point out some unsolved challenges and promising future works. We expect this review to be beneficial to both fresh and senior researchers in this field, and give insights to researchers in other related areas regarding the utility of co-saliency detection algorithms.Comment: 28 pages, 12 figures, 3 table

Review of Visual Saliency Detection with Comprehensive Information

Visual saliency detection model simulates the human visual system to perceive the scene, and has been widely used in many vision tasks. With the acquisition technology development, more comprehensive information, such as depth cue, inter-image correspondence, or temporal relationship, is available to extend image saliency detection to RGBD saliency detection, co-saliency detection, or video saliency detection. RGBD saliency detection model focuses on extracting the salient regions from RGBD images by combining the depth information. Co-saliency detection model introduces the inter-image correspondence constraint to discover the common salient object in an image group. The goal of video saliency detection model is to locate the motion-related salient object in video sequences, which considers the motion cue and spatiotemporal constraint jointly. In this paper, we review different types of saliency detection algorithms, summarize the important issues of the existing methods, and discuss the existent problems and future works. Moreover, the evaluation datasets and quantitative measurements are briefly introduced, and the experimental analysis and discission are conducted to provide a holistic overview of different saliency detection methods.Comment: 18 pages, 11 figures, 7 tables, Accepted by IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology 2018, https://rmcong.github.io

Predicting Video Saliency with Object-to-Motion CNN and Two-layer Convolutional LSTM

Over the past few years, deep neural networks (DNNs) have exhibited great success in predicting the saliency of images. However, there are few works that apply DNNs to predict the saliency of generic videos. In this paper, we propose a novel DNN-based video saliency prediction method. Specifically, we establish a large-scale eye-tracking database of videos (LEDOV), which provides sufficient data to train the DNN models for predicting video saliency. Through the statistical analysis of our LEDOV database, we find that human attention is normally attracted by objects, particularly moving objects or the moving parts of objects. Accordingly, we propose an object-to-motion convolutional neural network (OM-CNN) to learn spatio-temporal features for predicting the intra-frame saliency via exploring the information of both objectness and object motion. We further find from our database that there exists a temporal correlation of human attention with a smooth saliency transition across video frames. Therefore, we develop a two-layer convolutional long short-term memory (2C-LSTM) network in our DNN-based method, using the extracted features of OM-CNN as the input. Consequently, the inter-frame saliency maps of videos can be generated, which consider the transition of attention across video frames. Finally, the experimental results show that our method advances the state-of-the-art in video saliency prediction.Comment: Jiang, Lai and Xu, Mai and Liu, Tie and Qiao, Minglang and Wang, Zulin; DeepVS: A Deep Learning Based Video Saliency Prediction Approach;The European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV); September 201

Spatiotemporal Knowledge Distillation for Efficient Estimation of Aerial Video Saliency

The performance of video saliency estimation techniques has achieved significant advances along with the rapid development of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). However, devices like cameras and drones may have limited computational capability and storage space so that the direct deployment of complex deep saliency models becomes infeasible. To address this problem, this paper proposes a dynamic saliency estimation approach for aerial videos via spatiotemporal knowledge distillation. In this approach, five components are involved, including two teachers, two students and the desired spatiotemporal model. The knowledge of spatial and temporal saliency is first separately transferred from the two complex and redundant teachers to their simple and compact students, and the input scenes are also degraded from high-resolution to low-resolution to remove the probable data redundancy so as to greatly speed up the feature extraction process. After that, the desired spatiotemporal model is further trained by distilling and encoding the spatial and temporal saliency knowledge of two students into a unified network. In this manner, the inter-model redundancy can be further removed for the effective estimation of dynamic saliency on aerial videos. Experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms ten state-of-the-art models in estimating visual saliency on aerial videos, while its speed reaches up to 28,738 FPS on the GPU platform