Salient object detection in HSI using MEV-SFS and saliency optimization

The existing methods in salient object detection (SOD) in hyperspectral images (HSI) have used different priors like center prior, boundary prior to procure cues to find the salient object. These methods fail, if the salient object is slightly touching the boundary. So, we extrapolate boundary connectivity, a measure to check if the object touches the boundary. The salient object is obtained by using background and foreground cues, which are calculated using boundary connectivity and contrast map, respectively. Also, to reduce the information redundancy and hence time complexity, we select top three most informative bands using different feature selection and feature extraction algorithms. The proposed algorithm is tested on HS-SOD dataset. It is observed that the proposed algorithm performs better than the state-of-the-art techniques in almost all the metrics, such as Precision (0.57), Recall (0.46), f_1 score (0.51), CC (0.43), NSS (2.13), and MAE (0.09). In addition, we performed a comparative analysis of four different feature selection (MEV-SFS, OPBS) and feature extraction (PCA, MNF) algorithms in the context of SOD in HSI. We observed that feature selection algorithms are computationally efficient with OPBS and MEV-SFS taking about 7.98 and 8.34 s on average to reduce the feature space, respectively.