Identification and ranking of relevant image content

In this paper, we present an image understanding algorithm for automatically identifying and ranking different image regions into several levels of importance. Given a color image, specialized maps for classifying image content namely: weighted similarity, weighted homogeneity, image contrast and memory colors are generated and combined to provide a metric for perceptual importance classification. Further analysis yields a region ranking map which sorts the image content into different levels of significance. The algorithm was tested on a large database of color images that consists of the Berkeley segmentation dataset as well as many other internal images. Experimental results show that our technique matches human manual ranking with 90% efficiency. Applications of the proposed algorithm include image rendering, classification, indexing and retrieval.