  We propose a framework for top-down salient object detection that
incorporates a tightly coupled image classification module. The classifier is
trained on novel category-aware sparse codes computed on object dictionaries
used for saliency modeling. A misclassification indicates that the
corresponding saliency model is inaccurate. Hence, the classifier selects
images for which the saliency models need to be updated. The category-aware
sparse coding produces better image classification accuracy as compared to
conventional sparse coding with a reduced computational complexity. A
saliency-weighted max-pooling is proposed to improve image classification,
which is further used to refine the saliency maps. Experimental results on
Graz-02 and PASCAL VOC-07 datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of salient
object detection. Although the role of the classifier is to support salient
object detection, we evaluate its performance in image classification and also
illustrate the utility of thresholded saliency maps for image segmentation.
