Existence Detection of Objects in Images for Robot Vision Using Saliency Histogram Features

In robotics and computer vision, saliency maps are frequently used to identify regions that contain potential objects of interest and to restrict object detection to those regions only. However, common saliency approaches do not provide information as to whether there really is an interesting object triggering saliency and therefore tend to highlight needless background as potential regions of interest. This paper addresses the problem by exploiting histogram features extracted from saliency maps to predict the existence of interesting objects in images and to quickly prune uninteresting images. To validate our approach, we constructed a database that consists of 1000 background and object images captured in the working environment of our robot. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves good detection performance and outperforms an existing existence detection approach [1].