An efficient algorithm for attention-driven image interpretation from segments

In the attention-driven image interpretation process, an image is interpreted as containing several perceptually attended objects as well as the background. The process benefits greatly a content-based image retrieval task with attentively important objects identified and emphasized. An important issue to be addressed in an attention-driven image interpretation is to reconstruct several attentive objects iteratively from the segments of an image by maximizing a global attention function. The object reconstruction is a combinational optimization problem with a complexity of 2ᴺ which is computationally very expensive when the number of segments N is large. In this paper, we formulate the attention-driven image interpretation process by a matrix representation. An efficient algorithm based on the elementary transformation of matrix is proposed to reduce the computational complexity to 3ωN(N – 1)² /2, where ω is the number of runs. Experimental results on both the synthetic and real data show a significantly improved processing speed with an acceptable degradation to the accuracy of object formulation. Copyright © 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.