Key object discovery and tracking based on context-aware saliency

In this paper, we propose an online key object discovery and tracking system based on visual saliency. We formulate the problem as a temporally consistent binary labelling task on a conditional random field and solve it by using a particle filter. We also propose a context-aware saliency measurement, which can be used to improve the accuracy of any static or dynamic saliency maps. Our refined saliency maps provide clearer indications as to where the key object lies. Based on good saliency cues, we can further segment the key object inside the resulting bounding box, considering the spatial and temporal context. We tested our system extensively on different video clips. The results show that our method has significantly improved the saliency maps and tracks the key object accurately.