Visual System Inspired Model for Salient Region Detection in Two Cortical Pathways

Inspired by the research of visual systems in neuroanatomy and psychology, a novel model for salient region detection in an image is proposed in the paper based on the "what" and "where" pathways. The operation of the model can be divided into two stages: finding and shifting salient regions. Current salient region and potential targets of an image are firstly found and marked according to statistical feature saliency. Series of next salient regions are then detected by altering different current salient region and alterative attracting force computation. Experimental results with natural images demonstrate its effectiveness and robustness