Salient Object Subitizing

People can immediately and precisely identify that an image contains 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 using an online crowdsourcing marketplace. We show that a proposed subitizing technique using an end-to-end Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model achieves significantly better than chance performance in matching human labels on our dataset. It attains 94% accuracy in detecting the existence of salient objects, and 42–82% accuracy (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.