Visual saliency detection for RGB-D images under a Bayesian framework

In this paper, we propose a saliency detection model for RGB-D images based on the deep features of RGB images and depth images within a Bayesian framework. By analysing 3D saliency in the case of RGB images and depth images, the class-conditional mutual information is computed for measuring the dependence of deep features extracted using a convolutional neural network; then, the posterior probability of the RGB-D saliency is formulated by applying Bayes’ theorem. By assuming that deep features are Gaussian distributions, a discriminative mixed-membership naive Bayes (DMNB) model is used to calculate the final saliency map. The Gaussian distribution parameters can be estimated in the DMNB model by using a variational inference-based expectation maximization algorithm. The experimental results on RGB-D images from the NLPR dataset and NJU-DS400 dataset show that the proposed model performs better than other existing models. © 2018, The Author(s).