Salient Region Detection via Multiple Hierarchy and Competition Mechanism

The detection of salient regions has attracted an increasing attention in machine vision. In this study, a novel and effective framework for saliency region detection is proposed to solve the problem of the low detection accuracy of traditional methods. Firstly, we divide the image into three levels. Second, each level uses three different feature methods to generate different feature saliency maps. Subsequently, a novel integration mechanism, termed competition mechanism, is introduced into the coarse saliency maps at the same level, and the two coarse saliency maps with the highest similarity are selected for fusion to ensure the effectiveness of the salient region map. Accordingly, after adjusting the scales of the saliency map after the fusion of different levels, among three coarse saliency maps of the different levels, the two feature maps with the most significant difference are selected to fuse to further obtain the final refined saliency map. Finally, using the proposed method, experiments on three benchmark datasets were conducted. As demonstrated by the experimental results, the proposed algorithm is superior to other state-of-the-art methods.