Salient object detection using color spatial distribution and minimum spanning tree weight

Salient object detection is very useful in many computer vision applications such as image segmentation, content-based image editing and object recognition. In this paper, we present a salient object detection algorithm by using color spatial distribution (CSD) and minimum spanning tree weight (MSTW). We first use a segmentation algorithm to decompose an image into superpixel-level elements, then use these elements as nodes to construct a minimum spanning tree (MST), each connected edge weight is the mean color difference between two nodes. CSD of each element can be computed by integrating color, spatial distance and MSTW. Note that if the color of one element is the most widely distributed over the entire image, it should have the biggest CSD value, we regard this element as a background node (BG Node). Then we use the MSTW between other element and BG node to generate a MSTW map. The superpixel-level saliency map can be obtained by combining the CSD map and MSTW map. Finally, we use a guided filter to get the pixel-level saliency map. Experimental results on two databases demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms other previous state-of-the-art approaches.