GRD Journals | Global Research and Development Journal for Engineering | International Conference on Innovations in Engineering and Technology

(ICIET) - 2016 | July 2016

e-ISSN: 2455-5703

Detection of Global Salient Region via High

Dimensional Color Transform and Local Spatial
Support
1T.

Jeyapriya 2G. Rajasekaran

1
P.G Scholar 2Assistant Professor (Sr. Grade)
1,2
Department of Information Technology
1,2
Mepco Schlenk Engineering College, Sivakasi 626005, India
Abstract
This paper proposes novice automatic salient region detection in an image which includes both the global and local features. The
main motivation behind this approach is to construct a saliency map by utilizing a linear combination of colors in a high
dimensional color space. In general, the human perception is highly complicated and non-linear and in response to that, the salient
region consists of distinct colors compared to the background. The estimation of an optimal construction of a saliency map was
done by agglomerating the low-dimensional colors to the high-dimensional feature vectors. Furthermore, a relative location and
color contrast between super pixels are utilized to improve the performance. It was tested under three distinct datasets to evaluate
the applicability and practicability of our proposed method.
Keyword- Salient Region Detection, super pixel, Trimap, random forest, color feature, high-dimensional color transform
__________________________________________________________________________________________________

I. INTRODUCTION
Salient Region Detection is to detect the important region in an image in terms of the saliency map. In previous studies, many
methods are applied to detect salient region. Color is very important visual cue in Salient Region Detection Techniques. This work
contain Segmentation [20], object recognition [21]. Novel approach is applied in this work.
This approach uses the Tree-based Classifier to estimate the location of salient region. This classifier classifies each
superpixel as background, foreground and unknown region. These regions form the initial Trimap. HDCT method separates the
background and foreground region for saliency map. HDCT and local learning methods are proposed from the Trimap. Global
based HDCT method is to find color feature. This method joins many representative color spaces. Map the low dimensional color
space into high dimensional color feature by using HDCT. Random forest method [50] applied in local learning based method.
This method performs the relative location and color contrast between superpixels. A random forest classifier to classifies the
saliency of a superpixel by comparing the distance and color contrast of a superpixel to the K-nearest foreground super pixels and
the K-nearest background super pixels. Join the saliency maps from the HDCT-based method and the local learning-based method
by weighted combination.
The key contributions of this work are summarized as follows:
HDCT based method is to evaluate the linear merging of background and foreground region.
Propose a learning based method that consider local spatial relation and color contrast between super pixels.
Proposed method can improve the performance of other methods for salient region detection, by using their results as the
initial saliency trimap.

II. RELATED WORK

A survey and a benchmark comparison of state-of-the-art salient region detection algorithms are available in [3] and [4]
respectively. Local-contrast-based models recognize salient regions by detecting rarity of image features in a small local region.
Itti et al. [5] proposed a saliency detection method that utilizes visual filters called centre-surround difference to compute local
color contrast. Harel et al. [6] proposed a graph-based visual saliency (GBVS) model; this model is based on the Markovian
approach on an activation map. This model explores the variance of centre-surround feature histograms. Many methods determine
saliency in superpixel level instead of pixel level; because that l is reduce the computation time. [34] Decomposed an image into
compact and perceptually homogeneous elements, and then considered the uniqueness and spatial distribution of these elements in
the CIE Lab color to detect salient regions. These models predict only the part of the object. They tend to give non-uniform weight
to the same salient object when different features presented in the same salient object.

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Detection of Global Salient Region via High Dimensional Color Transform and Local Spatial Support
(GRDJE / CONFERENCE / ICIET - 2016 / 021)

Fig. 1: Overview of our algorithm: (a) Input Image. (b) Over segmentation to superpixels. (c) Initial Salient Trimap.(d) Global Salient region
via HDCT. (e) Local Salient region detection via random forest. (f) Our final saliency map

Global-contrast-based models use color contrast with admiration to the whole image to determine salient regions. These
models can determine salient regions of an image uniformly with low computational complexity. Achanta et al. [7] proposed a
frequency-tuned approach to detect the centre-surround contrast using the color and luminance in the frequency domain as features.
Li et al. [43] allowed that the unique refocusing capability of light fields can robustly handle challenging saliency detection
problems such as alike foreground and background in a single image. Global-contrast-based method give reliable results at low
computational cost as they mostly contemplate a few specific colors that separate the foreground and the background of an image.
Statistical-learning-based models have also been inspected for saliency detection. Wang et al. [15] proposed a method
that jointly approximately the segmentation of objects learned by a trained classifier called the auto-context model to intensify an
appearance-based energy minimization framework for salient region detection. Yang et al. [36] ranked the alike of image regions
with foreground cues and background cues using graph-based manifold ranking based on affinity matrices and successfully
Conducted saliency detection. Borji and Itti [16] used local and global based learning for salient in many color spaces RGB and
LAB then joined them into final saliency map for salient region detection. These methods are usually more accurate and simple
detection structure. In this method have more computational time, so superpixel wise salient detection is used to overcome this
problem.

III. INITIAL SALIENT TRIMAP GENERATION

Salient Trimap method to determine the location of salient region in an image. This method performs an image in superpixel level.
Salient Trimap contain background region, foreground region and unknown region. This method calculates the feature vector of
image, such as color feature, histogram feature and location feature.
A. Superpixel Saliency Feature
First over segment the input image to form super pixels X={X1, . . .,XN}. SLIC superpixel [1] method is used for over segment the
image. This method is required low computational cost and high performance. Set the number of super pixels to N=500.
Combine various information, that are used in saliency detection. For saliency detection to build feature vector.
Concatenate the location of x and y superpixel into feature vector. Then concatenate the color feature using various color space
representations. Next concatenate the histogram feature. The histogram feature of the ith superpixel DH is measured using the chisquare distance between other superpixels histograms. It is defined as

( )2
,
( + )

=
=1 =1

(1)

Where b is the number of histogram bins. In this work used eight bins for each histogram.Global contrast of the ith
superpixel DHi is given by
N

DGi = d(ci , cj ),

(2)

j=1

Where d(ci , cj ) denotes the Euclidean distance between the ith and jth superpixels color values, ci and cj. To compute the color
contrast by using RGB, CIELAB, hue and saturation of eight color channels. The local contrast of the color feature DLi is defined
by
N
p

DLi = i,j d(ci , cj )

(3)

j=1

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Detection of Global Salient Region via High Dimensional Color Transform and Local Spatial Support
(GRDJE / CONFERENCE / ICIET - 2016 / 021)

1
1
exp( 2 ||pi pj ||22 ),
(4)
Zi
2p
Where pi [0,1] [0,1] denotes the normalized position of the ith superpixel and Zi is the normalization term. The
weight function to Provide many weight to neighboring superpixel. In this work set 2p = 0.25. Use the superpixel area, histogram
of gradient (HOG) and singular value feature(SVF) for texture and shape feature. The HOG gives display feature using pixel
gradient information. The SVF is determining the blurred region from test image. The SVF is feature based eigenimages[25],
which degenerate an image by a weighted summation of a number of Eigen images, where each weight is the singular value
accessed by singular value degeneration. The Eigen images corresponding to the largest singular values detect the overall
framework of the original image, and other smaller singular values illustrate detailed information.
p

i,j =

B. Initial Salient Trimap via Random Forest Classification

Compute the feature vector for the each superpixel, then to check whether every region is salient using by classification algorithm.
This work is used the Random Forest classification method. This model operates by constructing multiple decision trees at training
time. Random forest model combines the boostrap aggregating idea and random feature selection. These two ideas is to reduce
the generalization error. Few features are randomly selected from the decision tree. Previous method [2] used regression method
for every superpixel and classification via adaptive thresholding. Classification method is to classify each superpixel as background
and foreground.
Three-class classification method is to generate a trimap from output of random forest, instead of a binary classification,
which detect the reliable foreground and background region. Check whether each superpixel belongs to foreground candidate,
background candidate, or unknown regions using the response value extracted from the classifier. In this work used threshold
values Tf ore= 1 and Tback= 1. If a superpixels response value exceeds Tfore, then it set to the foreground; however, if the value is
lower than Tback, then it set to the background, otherwise it is considered as unknown.

IV. SALIENCY ESTIMATION FROM TRIMAP

In this work present global salient region detection via HDCT and learning based method. Pixels in the salient region have
independent and identical color distribution. A linear combination of high dimensional color channels, separate salient regions and
backgrounds. Color contrast of local feature can reduce the gap between an in autonomous and identical color distribution model
implied by HDCT and true distributions of realistic images.
A. Global Saliency Estimation via HDCT
Goal of this method is to find the linear combination of color feature in HDCT space. The color of salient region and background
are separated. First concatenate the nonlinear RGB color space for to build HDCT space. Concatenated the CIELAB color space
and the hue and saturation channel in the HSV color space. Comprised color gradients in the RGB space. Salient region and
background have different amount of color contrast. That is handled by color gradient. 11 different color channels are used in
HDCT space. Substitute power law transformation to each color coefficient after normalizing the coefficient between [0,1], three
gamma values are used here [0.5, 1.0 and 2.0]. This resulted in a high-dimensional matrix to represent the colors of an image:

R11 R12 R13 G1 1

R 21 R 22 R 23 G21
..
..
..
.. RNl , (5)
K = ..
.
.
.
.
.

[ R N1 R N2 R N3 GN1 ]
In which Riand Gidenote the test images i thsuperpixels mean pixel value of the R color channel and G color channel,
respectively. Obtain an HDCT matrix K with l = 11 3 = 33 by using 11 color channels. To calculate the effectiveness of the many
color channel and power-law transformations. This work used 2,500 images in MSRA-B dataset. To obtain saliency map, handle
the foreground and background candidate color samples in trimap to evaluate an optimal linear combination of color coefficient to
separate the salient region color and background color. Define this problem as al2regularized least squares problem that minimizes
min ||(U K)||22 + ||||22 ,

(6)

where R is the coefficient vector, is a weighting parameter and K is a M l matrix with every row of K
corresponding to color samples in the foreground/background regions:
l

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128

Detection of Global Salient Region via High Dimensional Color Transform and Local Spatial Support
(GRDJE / CONFERENCE / ICIET - 2016 / 021)

GFS11
.
.

GFS1f

R FS1 1 R FS2 1 R FS3 1

.
.
.
.
.
.
K =

R FS1 f R FS2 f R FS3 f

1
R BS
1

2
R 3
R BS
1 BS1

GBS1 1

.
.
,

.
.
]

(7)

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
3
1
1
2
[R BSb R BSb R BSb GBSb
Where FSi and BSi denote the ith foreground candidate superpixel and jth background superpixel. M is the number
of color samples, f and b denotes number of foreground and background region, such that M=f+b.U isan M dimensional vector
with value equal to 0 and 1 if a color samples belongs to the foreground and background candidate respectively:
U = [ 1 1 . . .1 0 0 . . . 0 ] .
(8)
f_1_s

b_0_s

The l2 regularized least squares problem is a well-conditioned problem that can be readily minimized with respect to as =
+ )1 U. =0.05 produce the best result. After we obtain , the saliency map can be constructed as
( ) = =1 , 1,2, . . ,
(8)
This denotes linear combination of the color coefficient of HDCT. The l2 normalizer in the least square formulation.
Saliency map is more reliable for the both foreground and background superpixels are initially classified in the trimap. Tested
several values of , and the normalizer l2 least square with nonzero produces better saliency maps than the least square method
without regularize ( = 0). Both foreground and background superpixels in HDCT space are important for this work. The overall
process of the HDCT-based saliency detection is described in algorithm 1.
B. Local Saliency Estimation via Regression
In HDCT method first determine the k-nearest foreground superpixels and k-nearest background superpixels. For each
superpixel Xi, find the
K-nearest foreground superpixels XFS = {XFS1 ,XFS2, . . . ,XFSK} and K-nearest background superpixels
XBS ={XBS1, XBS2, . . . ,XBSK}, and utilize the Euclidean distance between a superpixel Xi and superpixels XFS or XBS as
features. The Euclidean distance to the K-nearest foreground

Fig. 2: An illustration on local saliency features. Black, white and gray regions denotes background, foreground and unknown superpixels

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129

Detection of Global Salient Region via High Dimensional Color Transform and Local Spatial Support
(GRDJE / CONFERENCE / ICIET - 2016 / 021)

The Euclidean distance to the K-nearest foreground (dFSi RK1) and background (dBSi RK1) features of the i thsuperpixel is defined
as follows:
|| ||22
|| ||22
1

|| ||22
|| ||22
2
1
.
.
=
, =
(9)
.
.
.
.
2
2
||

||
||

2]
1 ||2 ]
[
[

th
Where FSij denotes the j nearest foreground superpixel and BSij denotes the jthnearest background superpixel from the
th
i superpixel. The spatial distances between a candidate superpixel and the nearby foreground/background superpixels can be a
useful feature for evaluating the saliency degree. The feature vector of color distances from the ithsuperpixel to the K-nearest
foreground (dCFiR8K1) and background (dCBiR8K1) superpixels is defined as follows:
( , )
( , )
1

( , )
2
=
:
.
(
,

[ )]

( , )
2
=
:
.
(
,

[ )]

(10)

Eight color channels are used to measure the color distance, where ci ,cFSi j, and cBSi jare eight-dimensional color vectors.
The distance vector d(ci , cFSi j) is eight-dimensional vector, where each element of d(ci , cFSi j) is the distance in a single color
channel. For saliency evaluation, used the superpixel-wise random forest [50] algorithm, derive feature vectors using Initial trimap.
Initial trimap derived by random forest classification method. Two stages of random forest, divided the training data set into two
disjoint sets so that the second random forest is trained with many realistic inputs. The first random forest trained with one data set
and access training data set for second random forest. This process is repeated in a manner alike to five-fold cross-validation.
C. Final Saliency Map Generation
Final saliency map generated from global and local saliency maps. HDCT-based saliency map to catch the object precisely. The
false negative rate is almost high mature to textures or noise. In contrast, the learning-based saliency map is fewer affected by
noise, and it has a low false negative rate but a high false positive rate. Combine the two maps for saliency map. Proposed Two
approaches to combine the two saliency map. The first approach is to act the pixelwise multiplication of the two maps:
1
Smult = (p(SG ) p(SL )),
(11)
Z
Where Z is a normalization factor, p(.) is a pixel wise combination function. SG is the global saliency result, and SL is
the local saliency result. The second approach is to join the two maps using a summation:
1
Ssum = (p(SG ) + p(SL )),
(12)
Z
Use weightage to the highly salient regions. The weight values are computed by contrasting the saliency map with the
ground truth. Compute the optimal weight values for the linear summation by solving the nonlinear least-squares problem, as
Shown below:
min ||1 p(2 SG ) + 3 p(4 SL ) GT||22 ,
(13)
1 0,2 0,
3 0,4 0

Where GTis the ground truth of an image in the training data. The final solution for the objective function in Eq. (17) is
obtained as 1= 1.15, 2= 0.74,3= 1.57, and 4= 0.89. Fig. 3 shows the precision-recall curve of the joined map.

Fig. 3: Comparison of precision-recall curves of each step on the MSRA-B dataset

The equation of the final saliency map combination as:

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130

Detection of Global Salient Region via High Dimensional Color Transform and Local Spatial Support
(GRDJE / CONFERENCE / ICIET - 2016 / 021)

1
Sfinal = (1 p(2 SG ) + 3 p(4 SL )
(14)
Z
Discover the performance greatly increments after linking the two maps: highly salient regions that have been caught by
the local saliency map are conserved, and the false negative region that is ambiguously salient is damaged. The learning-based
method can detect the saliency degree by detecting the spatial distribution of the nearest foreground and background superpixels.
Learning-based method contains a better result than the matting algorithm.

V. EXPERIMENTS
A. Benchmark Datasets for Salient Region Detection
1) MSRA-B Dataset
5,000 images are in the MSRA-B dataset with the pixel-wise ground truth. Color of saliency region different from the background
region. Same training set used, including 2,500 images and the test set including 2,000 images.

Fig. 4:

F-measure curve with state-of-the-art algorithm on MSRA-B dataset

B. Performance Evaluation
Use two standard criteria for calculate salient region detection algorithm: precision-recall rate and F-measure rate.
1) Precision-Recall Evaluation
The precision is also called the positive predictive value, and it is defined as the ratio of the number of ground-truth pixels retrieved
as a salient region to the total number of pixels retrieved as the salient region.

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Detection of Global Salient Region via High Dimensional Color Transform and Local Spatial Support
(GRDJE / CONFERENCE / ICIET - 2016 / 021)

VI. CONCLUSION
A novel salient region detection method that concludes the foreground regions from a trimap using two different methods: global
saliency estimation via HDCT and local saliency estimation via regression. The trimap-based robust estimation overcomes the
limitations of inaccurate initial saliency classification. As a result this method achieves good performance and is computationally
efficient in comparison to the state-of-the art methods. Proposed method of this work is the best performing method for salient
region detection. The goal to extend the feature for the initial trimap to another improves algorithm performance.

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