Irregularity-based image regions saliency identification and evaluation

Saliency or salient region extraction from images is still a challenging field as it needs some understanding of the image and its nature. A technique that is suitable for some applications is not necessarily useful in other applications, thus, saliency identification is dependent upon the application. Based on a survey of existing methods of saliency detection, a new technique to extract the salient regions from an image is proposed that utilizes local features of the region surrounding each pixel. The level of saliency is decided based on the irregularity of the region with compared to other regions. To make the process fully automatic, a new Fuzzy-based thresholding technique has also been developed. In addition to the above, a survey of existing saliency evaluation techniques has been carried out and we have proposed new evaluation methods. The proposed saliency extraction technique has been compared with other algorithms reported in the literature, and the results are discussed in detail.