Salient Region Filtering for Background Subtraction

The use of salient regions is an increasingly popular approach to image retrieval. For situations where object retrieval is required and where the foreground and background can be assumed to have different characteristics, it becomes useful to exclude salient regions which are characteristic of the background if they can be identified before matching is undertaken. This paper proposes a technique to enhance the performance of object retrieval by filtering out salient regions believed to be associated with the background area of the images. Salient regions from background only images are extracted and clustered using descriptors representing the salient regions. The clusters are then used in the retrieval process to identify salient regions likely to be part of the background in images containing object and background. Salient regions close to background clusters are pruned before matching and only the remaining salient regions are used in the retrieval. Experiments on object retrieval show that the use of salient region background filtering gives an improvement in performance when compared with the unfiltered method.