Performance evaluation of salient object detection techniques

Abstract Recently, the detection and segmentation of salient objects that attract the attention of human visual in images is determined by using salient object detection (SOD) techniques. As an essential computer vision problem, SOD has increasingly attracted the researchers’ interest over the years. While a lot of SOD models and applications have been proposed, there is still a lack of deep understanding of the issues and achievements. A comprehensive study on the recent techniques of SOD is provided in this paper. Precisely, this paper presents a review of SOD techniques from various perspectives. Various image segmentation techniques are presented such as segmentation based on machine learning or deep learning, the second perspective concentrates on classifying them into supervised and unsupervised learning techniques and the last one based on manual approach, semi-automatic approach, and fully automatic approach and so on. Then, the paper presents a summarization of datasets used for SOD. Finally, analyses of SOD models and comparison results are presented.