Small Object Segmentation Based on Visual Saliency in Natural Images

Object segmentation is a challenging task in image processing and computer vision. In this paper, we present a visual attention based segmentation method to segment small sized interesting objects in natural images. Different from the traditional methods, we first search the region of interest by using our novel saliency-based method, which is mainly based on band-pass filtering, to obtain the appropriate frequency. Secondly, we applied the Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) to locate the object region. By incorporating the visual attention analysis into object segmentation, our proposed approach is able to narrow the search region for object segmentation, so that the accuracy is increased and the computational complexity is reduced. The experimental results indicate that our proposed approach is efficient for object segmentation in natural images, especially for small objects. Our proposed method significantly outperforms traditional GMM based segmentation. Keywords—Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM), Visual Saliency, Segmentation, Object Detection.