The saliency grouping field

A saliency map specifies the relevance of locations in an image and good methods exist today for recovering it automatically in a bottom-up fashion. This paper addresses the problem of finding organization in an actual saliency map of everyday images through a grouping field in order to elicit structure that can be used for a variety of purposes. After calculating the saliency using a version of the Itti et al. model, we retain only the maxima of the map as features. Then we calculate an initial grouping field by convolving the salient locations with orientation-selective grouping kernels. Finally we iteratively reinforce the field to enhance perceptually salient components.