A local spatiotemporal optimization framework for video saliency detection using region covariance

Visual saliency is widely applied to computer vision. Image saliency detection has been extensively studied, while there are only a few effective methods of computing saliency for videos owing to its high challenge. Inspired by image saliency methods, this paper proposes a unified spatiotemporal feature extraction and optimization framework for video saliency. First, the spatiotemporal feature descriptor is constructed via region covariance. Then, initial saliency map is computed by the local contrast of the descriptor. Finally, a local spatiotemporal optimization framework considering the previous and next frames of the current one is modeled to obtain the final saliency map. Extensive experiments on two public datasets demonstrate that the proposed algorithm not only outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, but also is of great extendibility. © 2016, Science Press. All right reserved.