# Iterative Saliency Enhancement using Superpixel Similarity

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.00665 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00665/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Dec 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.7062/) (2014)
- [U2-Net: Going Deeper with Nested U-Structure for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.09007/) (2020)
- [EGNet:Edge Guidance Network for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08297/) (2019)
- [A Simple Pooling-Based Design for Real-Time Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09569/) (2019)
- [Salient Object Detection in the Deep Learning Era: An In-Depth Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09146/) (2019)
- [Amulet: Aggregating Multi-level Convolutional Features for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.02001/) (2017)
- [Selectivity or Invariance: Boundary-aware Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.10066/) (2018)
- [Quantized Densely Connected U-Nets for Efficient Landmark Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.02194/) (2018)
- [An Iterative Spanning Forest Framework for Superpixel Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.10041/) (2018)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Saliency Object Detection (SOD) has several applications in image analysis. The methods have evolved from image-intrinsic to object-inspired (deep-learning-based) models. When a model fail, however, there is no alternative to enhance its saliency map. We fill this gap by introducing a hybrid approach, named textitIterative Saliency Enhancement over Superpixel Similarity (ISESS), that iteratively generates enhanced saliency maps by executing two operations alternately: object-based superpixel segmentation and superpixel-based saliency estimation -- cycling operations never exploited. ISESS estimates seeds for superpixel delineation from a given saliency map and defines superpixel queries in the foreground and background. A new saliency map results from color similarities between queries and superpixels at each iteration. The process repeats and, after a given number of iterations, the generated saliency maps are combined into one by cellular automata. Finally, the resulting map is merged with the initial one by the maximum bewteen their average values per superpixel. We demonstrate that our hybrid model can consistently outperform three state-of-the-art deep-learning-based methods on five image datasets.