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Salient Object Subitizing

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Abstract

We study the problem of salient object subitizing, i.e. predicting the existence and the number of salient objects in an image using holistic cues. This task is inspired by the ability of people to quickly and accurately identify the number of items within the subitizing range (1–4). To this end, we present a salient object subitizing image dataset of about 14 K everyday images which are annotated using an online crowdsourcing marketplace. We show that using an end-to-end trained convolutional neural network (CNN) model, we achieve prediction accuracy comparable to human performance in identifying images with zero or one salient object. For images with multiple salient objects, our model also provides significantly better than chance performance without requiring any localization process. Moreover, we propose a method to improve the training of the CNN subitizing model by leveraging synthetic images. In experiments, we demonstrate the accuracy and generalizability of our CNN subitizing model and its applications in salient object detection and image retrieval.

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Notes

  1. http://www.cs.bu.edu/groups/ivc/Subitizing/.

  2. We use the subset of ImageNet images with bounding box annotations.

  3. The F-score is computed as \(\frac{2RP}{(R+P)}\), where R and P denote recall and precision respectively.

  4. When evaluated on the test set used by Zhang et al. (2015a), our best method GoogleNet_Syn_FT achieves a mAP score of 85.0%.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported in part by US NSF Grants 0910908 and 1029430, and gifts from Adobe and NVIDIA.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Science Department, Boston University, Boston, MA, USA

    Shugao Ma, Mehrnoosh Sameki, Stan Sclaroff & Margrit Betke

  2. Adobe Research, San Jose, CA, USA

    Jianming Zhang, Zhe Lin, Xiaohui Shen, Brian Price & Radomír Měch

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  1. Jianming Zhang
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Correspondence to Jianming Zhang.

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Communicated by Antonio Torralba.

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Zhang, J., Ma, S., Sameki, M. et al. Salient Object Subitizing. Int J Comput Vis 124, 169–186 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11263-017-1011-0

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