Salient Object Subitizing

Jianming Zhang, Shugao Ma, Mehrnoosh Sameki, Stan Sclaroff, Margrit Betke, Zhe Lin, Xiaohui Shen, Brian Price, Radomir Mech; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015, pp. 4045-4054

Abstract


People can immediately and precisely identify 1, 2, 3 or 4 items by a simple glance. The phenomenon, known as Subitizing, inspires us to pursue the task of Salient Object Subitizing (SOS), i.e. predicting the existence and the number of salient objects in a scene using holistic cues. To study this problem, we propose a new image dataset annotated by Amazon Mechanical Turk. We show that for a substantial proportion of our dataset, there is a high labeling consistency among different subjects, even when a very limited viewing time (0.5s) is given. On our dataset, the baseline method using the global Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) feature achieves 94% recall rate in detecting the existence of salient objects, and 42-82% recall rate (chance is 20%) in predicting the number of salient objects (1, 2, 3, and 4+), without resorting to any object localization process. Finally, we demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed subitizing technique in two computer vision applications: salient object detection and object proposal.

Related Material


[pdf]
[bibtex]
@InProceedings{Zhang_2015_CVPR,
author = {Zhang, Jianming and Ma, Shugao and Sameki, Mehrnoosh and Sclaroff, Stan and Betke, Margrit and Lin, Zhe and Shen, Xiaohui and Price, Brian and Mech, Radomir},
title = {Salient Object Subitizing},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
month = {June},
year = {2015}
}