Saliency cuts: Salient region extraction based on local adaptive thresholding for image information recognition of the visually impaired

Abstract

In recent years, there has been an increased scope for assistive software and technologies, which help the visually impaired to perceive and recognize natural scene images. In this article, we propose a novel saliency cuts approach using local adaptive thresholding to obtain four regions from a given saliency map. The saliency cuts approach is an effective tool for salient object detection. First, we produce four regions for image segmentation using a saliency map as an input image and applying an automatic threshold operation. Second, the four regions are used to initialize an iterative version of the Grab Cut algorithm and to produce a robust and high-quality binary mask with a full resolution. Lastly, based on the binary mask and extracted salient object, outer boundaries and internal edges are detected by Canny edge detection method. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method correctly detects and extracts the main contents of the image sequences for delivering visually salient information to the visually impaired people compared to the results of existing salient object segmentation algorithms.