The Image Saliency Problem and its Applications

Abstract

In recent years, the research area of saliency analysis and Salient Object Detection (SOD) has been intensively investigated by the computer vision community. This paper explores the main directions of research in SOD by categorizing the important published works with regard to the proposed saliency extraction mechanism. Another aim of this paper is to provide details regarding specific application areas. An investigation into a highly active and prioritized medical problem, namely melanoma segmentation in skin cancer images using saliency is also analyzed. To advance the research scope of this paper, existing databases, benchmarks and metrics used in the performance evaluation are presented and discussed.