Saliency Aggregation: A Data-Driven Approach

A variety of methods have been developed for visual saliency analysis. These methods often complement each other. This paper addresses the problem of aggregating various saliency analysis methods such that the aggregation result outperforms each individual one. We have two major observations. First, different methods perform differently in saliency analysis. Second, the performance of a saliency analysis method varies with individual images. Our idea is to use data-driven approaches to saliency aggregation that appropriately consider the performance gaps among individual methods and the performance dependence of each method on individual images. This paper discusses various data-driven approaches and finds that the image-dependent aggregation method works best. Specifically, our method uses a Conditional Random Field (CRF) framework for saliency aggregation that not only models the contribution from individual saliency map but also the interaction between neighboring pixels. To account for the dependence of aggregation on an individual image, our approach selects a subset of images similar to the input image from a training data set and trains the CRF aggregation model only using this subset instead of the whole training set. Our experiments on public saliency benchmarks show that our aggregation method outperforms each individual saliency method and is robust with the selection of aggregated methods.