Moving visual focus in salient object segmentation

Saliency detection plays an important role in image segmentation, object detection and retrieval, which attracts more attention in the field of computer vision recently. Most existing saliency detection algorithms have not considered the influence of visual focus (VF) shifting yet. In this study, a novel algorithm named moving region contrast (MRC) is proposed to analyse image saliency. The algorithm MRC is built on a novel concept of moving VF. The initial VF is defined as the geometric centre of the image. Then the VF is calculated iteratively by focus-moving technique where a saliency gravitation model is employed to determine the moving direction. The salient region is obtained according to the final VF. The experiments are conducted on the dataset with 1000 images released by Achanta. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm achieves marked improvements in performance and outperforms other 11 popular algorithms.