-
Understanding Popout: Pre-attentive Segmentation through Nondirectional Repulsion
- Stella X. YU and Jianbo SHI
Technical report CMU-RI-TR-01-20, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, 2001.
- Abstract
-
The goal of pre-attentive segmentation is to mark conspicuous
image locations such as region boundaries, smooth contours and
popout targets against backgrounds. This salience detection relies
on not only feature similarity analysis but also local feature
contrast. We identify these two measures with attraction and
nondirectional repulsion, and unify the dual processes of
association by attraction and segregation by repulsion in one
grouping framework. We generalize normalized cuts to multi-way
partitioning with these dual measures and show that the criterion can
be viewed as a stochastic jump-diffusion process, where the
probability of jump is determined by the relative strengths of
attraction and repulsion. We demonstrate that this extended model
can deal with salience detection under various situations as well as
the asymmetry in visual search. Through these results, we provide a
clear understanding of the role of negative weights in the graph
partitioning framework. This opens up the possibilities of encoding
negative correlations in constraint satisfaction problems, where
solutions by simple and robust eigendecomposition become possible.
- Keywords
-
image segmentation, figure-ground, graph partitioning, repulsion, popout, visual search, salience detection
PDF(467KB)