Cauchy graph embedding based diffusion model for salient object detection.

Salient object detection has been a rather hot research topic recently, due to its potential applications in image compression, scene classification, image registration, and so forth. The overwhelming majority of existing computational models are designed based on computer vision techniques by using lots of image cues and priors. Actually, salient object detection is derived from the biological perceptual mechanism, and biological evidence shows that the spread of the spatial attention generates the object attention. Inspired by this, we attempt to utilize the emerging spread mechanism of object attention to construct a new computational model. A novel Cauchy graph embedding based diffusion (CGED) model is proposed to fulfill the spread process. Combining the diffusion model and attention prediction model, a salient object detection approach is presented through perceptually grouping the multiscale diffused attention maps. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is validated on the salient object dataset. The experimental results show that the CGED process can obviously improve the performance of salient object detection compared with the input spatial attention map, and the proposed approach can achieve performance comparable to that of state-of-the-art approaches.