Determining the Existence of Objects in an Image and Its Application to Image Thumbnailing

In recent years, computer vision applications dealing with foreground objects are becoming more important with an increasing demand of advanced intelligent systems. Most of these applications assume that an image contains one or more objects, which often produce undesired results when noticeable objects do not appear in the image. In this letter, we address the problem of ascertaining the existence of objects in an image. In the first step, the input image is partitioned into nonoverlapping local patches, then the patches are categorized into three classes, namely natural, man-made, and object to estimate object candidates. Then a Bayesian methodology is employed to produce more reliable results by eliminating false positives. To boost the object patch detection performance, we exploit the difference between coarse and fine segmentation results. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, extensive experiments have been conducted on several benchmark image databases. Furthermore, we have shown the usefulness of our approach by applying it to a real application (i.e., image thumbnailing).