Depth-aware salient object segmentation

&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; Object segmentation is an important task which is widely employed in many computer vision applications such as object detection, tracking, recognition, and retrieval. It can be seen as a two-phase process: object detection and segmentation. Object segmentation becomes more challenging in case there is no prior knowledge about the object in the scene. In such conditions, visual attention analysis via saliency mapping may offer a mean to predict the object location by using visual contrast, local or global, to identify regions that draw strong attention in the image. However, in such situations as clutter background, highly varied object surface, or shadow, regular and salient object segmentation approaches based on a single image feature such as color or brightness have shown to be insufficient for the task. This work proposes a new salient object segmentation method which uses a depth map obtained from the input image for enhancing the accuracy of saliency mapping. A deep learning-based method is employed for depth map estimation. Our experiments showed that the proposed method outperforms other state-of-the-art object segmentation algorithms in terms of recall and precision.&#x0D; KeywordsSaliency map, Depth map, deep learning, object segmentation&#x0D; References[1] Itti, C. Koch, E. Niebur, A model of saliency-based visual attention for rapid scene analysis, IEEE Transactions on pattern analysis and machine intelligence 20(11) (1998) 1254-1259.[2] Goferman, L. Zelnik-Manor, A. Tal, Context-aware saliency detection, IEEE transactions on pattern analysis and machine intelligence 34(10) (2012) 1915-1926.[3] Kanan, M.H. Tong, L. Zhang, G.W. Cottrell, Sun: Top-down saliency using natural statistics, Visual cognition 17(6-7) (2009) 979-1003.[4] Liu, Z. Yuan, J. Sun, J. Wang, N. Zheng, X. 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