Saliency maps are obtained by stacking a family of hierarchical contours. Such maps were introduced in the PhD of Laurent Najman, rediscovered independently by Laurent Guigues in a IJCV paper on a scale-set theory, and popularized by Pablo Arbelaez under the name of ultrametric contour maps. An equivalence theorem betwen saliency maps and ultrametric watersheds have been proposed in JMIV-2011. Currently, Jean Cousty and Laurent Najman are working towards proposing efficient and proven algorithms that compute saliency maps.

Publications

• The PAMI paper introducing saliency map is here.
• Theory (in particular equivalence with ultrametric watershed) is here.
• Correct and efficient algorithms are proposed here.

Source Code

• Source code can be downloaded here.