What Makes a Patch Distinct?

Ran Margolin, Ayellet Tal, Lihi Zelnik-Manor; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013, pp. 1139-1146

What makes an object salient? Most previous work assert that distinctness is the dominating factor. The difference between the various algorithms is in the way they compute distinctness. Some focus on the patterns, others on the colors, and several add high-level cues and priors. We propose a simple, yet powerful, algorithm that integrates these three factors. Our key contribution is a novel and fast approach to compute pattern distinctness. We rely on the inner statistics of the patches in the image for identifying unique patterns. We provide an extensive evaluation and show that our approach outperforms all state-of-the-art methods on the five most commonly-used datasets.