Recent advances in saliency detection have utilized deep learning to obtain
high level features to detect salient regions in a scene. These advances have
demonstrated superior results over previous works that utilize hand-crafted low
level features for saliency detection. In this paper, we demonstrate that
hand-crafted features can provide complementary information to enhance
performance of saliency detection that utilizes only high level features. Our
method utilizes both high level and low level features for saliency detection
under a unified deep learning framework. The high level features are extracted
using the VGG-net, and the low level features are compared with other parts of
an image to form a low level distance map. The low level distance map is then
encoded using a convolutional neural network(CNN) with multiple 1X1
convolutional and ReLU layers. We concatenate the encoded low level distance
map and the high level features, and connect them to a fully connected neural
network classifier to evaluate the saliency of a query region. Our experiments
show that our method can further improve the performance of state-of-the-art
deep learning-based saliency detection methods.Comment: Accepted by IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern
Recognition(CVPR) 2016. Project page:
https://github.com/gylee1103/SaliencyEL