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Visual Saliency Using Binary Spectrum of Walsh–Hadamard Transform and Its Applications to Ship Detection in Multispectral Imagery

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Abstract

Detection of visual saliency is valuable for applications like robot navigation, adaptive image compression, and object recognition. In this paper, we propose a fast frequency domain visual saliency method by use of the binary spectrum of Walsh–Hadamard transform (WHT). The method achieves saliency detection by simply exploiting the WHT components of the scene under view. Unlike space domain-based approaches, our method performs the cortical center-surround suppression in frequency domain and thus has implicit biological plausibility. By virtue of simplicity and speed of the WHT, the proposed method is very simple and fast in computation, and outperforms existing state-of-the-art saliency detection methods, when evaluated by using the capability of eye fixation prediction. In arduous tasks of ship detection in multispectral imagery, large amount of multispectral data require real-time processing and analyzing. As a very fast and effective technique for saliency detection, the proposed method is modified and applied to automatic ship detection in multispectral imagery. The robustness of the method against sea clutters is further proved.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 61263048), by the Scientific Research Foundation of Yunnan Provincial Department of Education (2012Y277), by the Scientific Research Project of Yunnan University (2011YB21), and by the Young and Middle-Aged Backbone Teachers’ Cultivation Plan of Yunnan University (XT412003).

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  1. School of Information Science and Engineering, Yunnan University, Kunming, 650091, China

    Ying Yu & Jian Yang

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  1. Ying Yu
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  2. Jian Yang
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Correspondence to Ying Yu.

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Yu, Y., Yang, J. Visual Saliency Using Binary Spectrum of Walsh–Hadamard Transform and Its Applications to Ship Detection in Multispectral Imagery. Neural Process Lett 45, 759–776 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11063-016-9507-0

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