Image co-saliency detection by propagating superpixel affinities

Image co-saliency detection is a valuable technique to highlight perceptually salient regions in image pairs. In this paper, we propose a self-contained co-saliency detection algorithm based on superpixel affinity matrix. We first compute both intra and inter similarities of superpixels of image pairs. Bipartite graph matching is applied to determine most reliable inter similarities. To update the similarity score between every two superpixels, we next employ a GPU-based all-pair SimRank algorithm to do propagation on the affinity matrix. Based on the inter superpixel affinities we derive a co-saliency measure that evaluates the foreground cohesiveness and locality compactness of superpixels within one image. The effectiveness of our method is demonstrated in experimental evaluation.