Fasa: Fast, accurate, and size-aware salient object detection

Abstract

Fast and accurate salient-object detectors are important for various image processing and computer vision applications, such as adaptive compression and object segmentation. It is also desirable to have a detector that is aware of the position and the size of the salient objects. In this paper, we propose a salient-object detection method that is fast, accurate, and size-aware. For efficient computation, we quantize the image colors and estimate the spatial positions and sizes of the quantized colors. We then feed these values into a statistical model to obtain a probability of saliency. In order to estimate the final saliency, this probability is combined with a global color contrast measure. We test our method on two public datasets and show that our method significantly outperforms the fast state-of-the-art methods. In addition, it has comparable performance and is an order of magnitude faster than the accurate state-of-the-art methods. We exhibit the potential of our algorithm by processing a high-definition video in real time.