Nonlocal center-surround reconstruction-based bottom-up saliency estimation
The center-surround comparison principle is widely used in existing bottom-up saliency estimation models. However, most of them are based on local image processing techniques which are hard to handle texture regions well as a relatively large neighborhood is required to represent textures. In this paper, we propose a nonlocal patch-based reconstruction approach to reformulate the center-surround comparison. In the proposed approach, the saliency is measured by the reconstruction residual of representing the central patch with a linear combination of its surrounding patches. As a generalization of Itti et al.'s classical center-surround comparison scheme, the proposed approach performs well on images with symmetric structures where Itti et al.'s method fails, as well as on general natural images. Numerical experiments show the proposed approach produces better results compared to the state-of-the-art algorithms on several public databases.