Saliency Detection via Absorbing Markov Chain

Abstract

In this paper, we formulate saliency detection via absorbing Markov chain on an image graph model. We jointly consider the appearance divergence and spatial distribution of salient objects and the background. The virtual boundary nodes are chosen as the absorbing nodes in a Markov chain and the absorbed time from each transient node to boundary absorbing nodes is computed. The absorbed time of transient node measures its global similarity with all absorbing nodes, and thus salient objects can be consistently separated from the background when the absorbed time is used as a metric. Since the time from transient node to absorbing nodes relies on the weights on the path and their spatial distance, the background region on the center of image may be salient. We further exploit the equilibrium distribution in an ergodic Markov chain to reduce the absorbed time in the long-range smooth background regions. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate robustness and efficiency of the proposed method against the state-of-the-art methods.