Saliency

The visual system provides us an enormous amount of information. For processing it in real time to be able to survive, humans (and other animals) have developed an attention system that allows them to filter out non important portions of the scene by just focusing on the most salient parts of what is being observed.

I wrote a paper about using saliency as a new feature for object detection obtaining good results. It was accepted for publication in the Image and Vision Computing (IMAVIS) journal. You can download the manuscript from here. For calculating the new proposed features, I wrote a fine-grained saliency library.  It requires OpenCV to run properly. You can download it from here. You can also download the source code.

If you want to see the algorithm applied to your own images quickly, just go to my online fine-grained saliency generator.