Date of Award

2011

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Applied Science (MASc)

Department

Electrical and Computer Engineering

First Advisor

Matthew Kyan

Abstract

In this work, three novel approaches to detecting visual attention in images are presented. The idea behind detecting areas within images or video that naturally attract a viewer’s attention is based on the concept of generating pre-attentive saliency maps. Saliency, in and of itself, relates to some measure of “conspicuity” in the visual field and is believed to be an important precursor for many tasks in computer vision. One of the proposed methods in this thesis detects salient regions, while the other two detect salient edges. The classical approach to saliency detection proposed by Itti is extended by introducing wavelets as a lossless resizing tool while maintaining the aspect of biological inspiration. In addition to this, the spectral residual method and the frequency tuned method are modified using wavelets to allow for salient edge detection. Tests show that the proposed methods yield results that are not only comparable to leading,cutting-edge methods, but also exceed them in terms of correct and complete object detection as well as noise reduction.