De-Emphasis of Distracting Image Regions Using Texture Power Maps

Abstract

We present a post-processing technique that selectively reduces the salience of distracting regions in an image. Computational models of attention predict that texture variation influences bottom-up attention mechanisms. Our method reduces the spatial variation of texture using power maps, high-order features describing local frequency content in an image. Modification of power maps results in effective regional de-emphasis. We validate our results quantitatively via a human subject search experiment and qualitatively with eye tracking data.