Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 17 (NIPS 2004)
Dashan Gao, Nuno Vasconcelos
Saliency mechanisms play an important role when visual recognition must be performed in cluttered scenes. We propose a computational defi- nition of saliency that deviates from existing models by equating saliency to discrimination. In particular, the salient attributes of a given visual class are defined as the features that enable best discrimination between that class and all other classes of recognition interest. It is shown that this definition leads to saliency algorithms of low complexity, that are scalable to large recognition problems, and is compatible with existing models of early biological vision. Experimental results demonstrating success in the context of challenging recognition problems are also pre- sented.