Unsupervised extraction of visual attention objects in color images

This paper proposes a generic model for unsupervised extraction of viewer's attention objects from color images. Without the full semantic understanding of image content, the model formulates the attention objects as a Markov random field (MRF) by integrating computational visual attention mechanisms with attention object growing techniques. Furthermore, we describe the MRF by a Gibbs random field with an energy function. The minimization of the energy function provides a practical way to obtain attention objects. Experimental results on 880 real images and user subjective evaluations by 16 subjects demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.