Automatic estimation of salient object regions across images, without any prior assumption or knowledge of the contents of the corresponding scenes, enhances many computer vision and computer graphics applications. We introduce a regional contrast based salient object detection algorithm, which simultaneously evaluates global contrast differences and spatial weighted coherence scores. The proposed algorithm is simple, efficient, naturally multi-scale, and produces full-resolution, high-quality saliency maps. These saliency maps are further used to initialize a novel iterative version of GrabCut, namely SaliencyCut, for high quality unsupervised salient object segmentation. We extensively evaluated our algorithm using traditional salient object detection datasets, as well as a more challenging Internet image dataset. Our experimental results demonstrate that our algorithm consistently outperforms 15 existing salient object detection and segmentation methods, yielding higher precision and better recall rates. We also show that our algorithm can be used to efficiently extract salient object masks from Internet images, enabling effective sketch-based image retrieval (SBIR) via simple shape comparisons. Despite such noisy internet images, where the saliency regions are ambiguous, our saliency guided image retrieval achieves a superior retrieval rate compared with state-of-the-art SBIR methods, and additionally provides important target object region information.

https://mmcheng.net/mftp/SalObj/PosterSaliency.pdf

Global contrast based salient region detection

Co-saliency is used to discover the common saliency on the multiple images, which is a relatively underexplored area. In this paper, we introduce a new cluster-based algorithm for co-saliency detection. Global correspondence between the multiple images is implicitly learned during the clustering process. Three visual attention cues: contrast, spatial, and corresponding, are devised to effectively measure the cluster saliency. The final co-saliency maps are generated by fusing the single image saliency and multiimage saliency. The advantage of our method is mostly bottom-up without heavy learning, and has the property of being simple, general, efficient, and effective. Quantitative and qualitative experiments result in a variety of benchmark datasets demonstrating the advantages of the proposed method over the competing co-saliency methods. Our method on single image also outperforms most the state-of-the-art saliency detection methods. Furthermore, we apply the co-saliency method on four vision applications: co-segmentation, robust image distance, weakly supervised learning, and video foreground detection, which demonstrate the potential usages of the co-saliency map.

/pdf/cluster-based-co-saliency-detection-4h8qkux0qg.pdf

Cluster-Based Co-Saliency Detection

Information visualization (InfoVis), the study of transforming data, information, and knowledge into interactive visual representations, is very important to users because it provides mental models of information. The boom in big data analytics has triggered broad use of InfoVis in a variety of domains, ranging from finance to sports to politics. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey and key insights into this fast-rising area. The research on InfoVis is organized into a taxonomy that contains four main categories, namely empirical methodologies, user interactions, visualization frameworks, and applications, which are each described in terms of their major goals, fundamental principles, recent trends, and state-of-the-art approaches. At the conclusion of this survey, we identify existing technical challenges and propose directions for future research.

/pdf/a-survey-on-information-visualization-recent-advances-and-3ydtv70qtw.pdf

A survey on information visualization: recent advances and challenges

Dynamic graph visualization focuses on the challenge of representing the evolution of relationships between entities in readable, scalable and effective diagrams. This work surveys the growing number of approaches in this discipline. We derive a hierarchical taxonomy of techniques by systematically categorizing and tagging publications. While static graph visualizations are often divided into node-link and matrix representations, we identify the representation of time as the major distinguishing feature for dynamic graph visualizations: either graphs are represented as animated diagrams or as static charts based on a timeline. Evaluations of animated approaches focus on dynamic stability for preserving the viewer's mental map or, in general, compare animated diagrams to timeline-based ones. A bibliographic analysis provides insights into the organization and development of the field and its community. Finally, we identify and discuss challenges for future research. We also provide feedback from experts, collected with a questionnaire, which gives a broad perspective of these challenges and the current state of the field.

A Taxonomy and Survey of Dynamic Graph Visualization

This paper introduces a new structure-aware shape deformation technique. The key idea is to detect continuous and discrete regular patterns and ensure that these patterns are preserved during free-...

Pattern-aware Deformation Using Sliding Dockers

Image resizing can be achieved more effectively if we have a better understanding of the image semantics. In this paper, we analyze the translational symmetry, which exists in many real-world images. By detecting the symmetric lattice in an image, we can summarize, instead of only distorting or cropping, the image content. This opens a new space for image resizing that allows us to manipulate, not only image pixels, but also the semantic cells in the lattice. As a general image contains both symmetry & non-symmetry regions and their natures are different, we propose to resize symmetry regions by summarization and non-symmetry region by warping. The difference in resizing strategy induces discontinuity at their shared boundary. We demonstrate how to reduce the artifact. To achieve practical resizing applications for general images, we developed a fast symmetry detection method that can detect multiple disjoint symmetry regions, even when the lattices are curved and perspectively viewed. Comparisons to state-of-the-art resizing techniques and a user study were conducted to validate the proposed method. Convincing visual results are shown to demonstrate its effectiveness.

Resizing by symmetry-summarization

We present a new approach for time-varying graph drawing that achieves both spatiotemporal coherence and multifocus+context visualization in a single framework Our approach utilizes existing graph layout algorithms to produce the initial graph layout, and formulates the problem of generating coherent time-varying graph visualization with the focus+context capability as a specially tailored deformation optimization problem We adopt the concept of the super graph to maintain spatiotemporal coherence and further balance the needs for aesthetic quality and dynamic stability when interacting with time-varying graphs through focus+context visualization Our method is particularly useful for multifocus+context visualization of time-varying graphs where we can preserve the mental map by preventing nodes in the focus from undergoing abrupt changes in size and location in the time sequence Experiments demonstrate that our method strikes a good balance between maintaining spatiotemporal coherence and accentuating visual foci, thus providing a more engaging viewing experience for the users

Kun-Chuan Feng

Papers

Resizing by symmetry-summarization

Coherent Time-Varying Graph Drawing with Multifocus+Context Interaction