A Saliency-Based Focusing Region Selection Method for Robust Auto-Focusing

This paper presents a salient region detection algorithm for auto-focusing based on the characteristics of a human's visual attention. To describe the saliency at the local, regional, and global levels, this paper proposes a set of novel features including multi-scale local contrast, variance, center-surround entropy, and closeness to the center. Those features are then prioritized to produce a saliency map. The major advantage of the proposed approach is twofold; i) robustness to changes in focus and ii) low computational complexity. The experimental results showed that the proposed method outperforms the existing low-level feature-based methods in the sense of both robustness and accuracy for auto-focusing.