Region-of-Interest Detection Based on Statistical Distinctiveness for Panchromatic Remote Sensing Images

Region-of-interest (ROI) detection plays a significant role in the analysis and interpretation of remote sensing images (RSI), due to the huge size of satellite images and their explosive growth in quantity. However, when applied to panchromatic RSI directly, traditional saliency models cannot achieve satisfying performance for two reasons: one is the computational efficiency decrease caused by the huge image size; the other is the absence of color information for panchromatic RSI. Thus, in this letter, an ROI detection model based on statistical distinctiveness (SD) is proposed for saliency analysis and ROIs detection in panchromatic RSI. The proposed SD model incorporates both the lower order SD (LSD) and the higher order SD (HSD), in order to identify regions of interest that are highly distinctive from the rest of the scene. Finally, the saliency map is determined by fusing cue maps obtained by calculating LSD locally and HSD globally. Experimental results show that our approach achieves promising results when compared with existing state-of-the-art saliency detection models.