Extracting salient lines by Visual Attention for omnidirectional image classification

Representing an image as a set of its key and interesting lines facilitates the image understanding and classification. In this paper, we propose a method to extract the significant and interesting lines of the scene, which probably are useful in image classification. The proposed method is inspired from the Visual Attention, which is a perceptual mechanism in human and other primates that direct their perceptions to the limited regions of the scene. The attended regions are usually valuable in performing the task. Since the approach of using the lines to classify the images is particularly useful for omnidirectional images, we specialize our method to deal with these kinds of images. In the experiments, we demonstrate how our proposed methods improve the image classification performance with processing only small parts of the input images.