How important is location information in saliency detection of natural images

Location information, i.e., the position of content in image plane, is considered as an important supplement in saliency detection. The effect of location information is usually evaluated by integrating it with the selected saliency detection methods and measuring the improvement, which is highly influenced by the selection of saliency methods. In this paper, we provide direct and quantitative analysis of the importance of location information for saliency detection in natural images. We firstly analyze the relationship between content location and saliency distribution on four public image datasets, and validate the distribution by simply treating location based Gaussian distribution as saliency map. To further validate the effectiveness of location information, we propose a location based saliency detection approach, which completely initializes saliency maps with location information and propagate saliency among patches based on color similarity, and discuss the robustness of location information’s effect. The experimental results show that location information plays a positive role in saliency detection, and the proposed method can outperform most state-of-the-art saliency detection methods and handle natural images with different object positions and multiple salient objects.