Salient Contour Detection using a Global Contour Discontinuity Measurement

Salient contour grouping/detection is one of the major topics in perceptual organization exploring the true meanings for contours. Extending contour’s discontinuity quality from low level discontinuity, we introduce a new perspective that a salient contour represents a sharp change in the ability to organize the image into meaningful parts. This new view gives a novel, general edge energy measure, which has important perceptual meanings. A new multiscale saliency function and its variational solution are also described. Experiments on real images validate our method.