A Cognitive Approach for Object Discovery

Object discovery is the task of detecting unknown objects in images. The task is of large interest in many fields of machine vision, ranging from the automatic analysis of web images to interpreting data of a mobile robot or a driver assistant system. Here, we present a new approach for object discovery, based on findings of the human visual system. Proto-objects are detected with a segmentation module, generating perceptually coherent image regions. In parallel, a saliency system detects regions of interest in images and serves to select segments, depending on their saliency. We obtain very good results on a database of salient objects and on real-world office scenes.