Image proposals:
Selective search [1]: hierarchical grouping based on different similarity metrics [code]
Salient object detection [2]: identify the segment which is easy to compose from itself but hard from remaining parts of the image.
EdgeBox [3]: identify the boxes that tightly enclose a set of edges are likely to contain an object.
ACF detector [4]: compute gradient histograms on image pyramids
Region Proposal Network (RPN) from faster-RCNN [5]
Video proposals:
[1] Zhu, Wangjiang, et al. “A key volume mining deep framework for action recognition.” CVPR. 2016.
[2] Xu, Huijuan, Abir Das, and Kate Saenko. “R-c3d: Region convolutional 3d network for temporal activity detection.” ICCV, 2017.