Deep convolutional neural network (CNN) based salient object detection methods have achieved state-of-the-art performance and outperform those unsupervised methods with a wide margin. In this paper, we propose to integrate deep and unsupervised saliency for salient object detection under a unified framework. Specifically, our method takes results of unsupervised saliency (Robust Background Detection, RBD) and normalized color images as inputs, and directly learns an end-to-end mapping between inputs and the corresponding saliency maps. The color images are fed into a Fully Convolutional Neural Networks (FCNN) adapted from semantic segmentation to exploit high-level semantic cues for salient object detection. Then the results from deep FCNN and RBD are concatenated to feed into a shallow network to map the concatenated feature maps to saliency maps. Finally, to obtain a spatially consistent saliency map with sharp object boundaries, we fuse superpixel level saliency map at multi-scale. Extensive experimental results on 8 benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches with a margin.
This paper presents a co-salient object detection method to find common salient regions in a set of images. We utilize deep saliency networks to transfer co-saliency prior knowledge and better capture high-level semantic information, and the resulting initial co-saliency maps are enhanced by seed propagation steps over an integrated graph. The deep saliency networks are trained in a supervised manner to avoid online weakly supervised learning and exploit them not only to extract high-level features but also to produce both intra- and inter-image saliency maps. Through a refinement step, the in…
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）
Pixel-wise prediction with deep neural network has become an effective paradigm for salient object detection (SOD) and achieved remarkable performance. However, very few SOD models are robust against adversarial attacks which are visually imperceptible for human visual attention. The previous work robust saliency (ROSA) shuffles the pre-segmented superpixels and then refines the coarse saliency map by the densely connected conditional random field (CRF). Different from ROSA that relies on various pre- and post-processings, this paper proposes a light-weight Learnable Noise (LeNo) to defend adv…
Unifying Global-Local Representations in Salient Object Detection with Transformer
School of Computing and Information Systems, Singapore Management University（新加坡管理大学计算与信息系统学院）；Adobe Research（奥多比研究院）；School of Computer Science and Engineering, South China University of Technology（华南理工大学计算机科学与工程学院）
Deep learning solutions of the salient object detection problem have achieved great results in recent years. The majority of these models are based on encoders and decoders, with a different multi-feature combination. In this paper, we show that feature concatenation works better than other combination methods like multiplication or addition. Also, joint feature learning gives better results, because of the information sharing during their processing. We designed a Complementary Extraction Module (CEM) to extract necessary features with edge preservation. Our proposed Excessiveness Loss (EL) f…
College of Computer Science and Engineering（计算机科学与工程学院）
We propose a novel method for salient object detection in different images. Our method integrates spatial features for efficient and robust representation to capture meaningful information about the salient objects. We then train a conditional random field (CRF) using the integrated features. The trained CRF model is then used to detect salient objects during the online testing stage. We perform experiments on two standard datasets and compare the performance of our method with different reference methods. Our experiments show that our method outperforms the compared methods in terms of precis…
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）
Existing state-of-the-art salient object detection networks rely on aggregating multi-level features of pre-trained convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Compared to high-level features, low-level features contribute less to performance but cost more computations because of their larger spatial resolutions. In this paper, we propose a novel Cascaded Partial Decoder (CPD) framework for fast and accurate salient object detection. On the one hand, the framework constructs partial decoder which discards larger resolution features of shallower layers for acceleration. On the other hand, we observe …
In the current salient object detection network, the most popular method is using U-shape structure. However, the massive number of parameters leads to more consumption of computing and storage resources which are not feasible to deploy on the limited memory device. Some others shallow layer network will not maintain the same accuracy compared with U-shape structure and the deep network structure with more parameters will not converge to a global minimum loss with great speed. To overcome all of these disadvantages, we proposed a new deep convolution network architecture with three contributio…
Recent advances in supervised salient object detection has resulted in significant performance on benchmark datasets. Training such models, however, requires expensive pixel-wise annotations of salient objects. Moreover, many existing salient object detection models assume that at least one salient object exists in the input image. Such an assumption often leads to less appealing saliency maps on the background images, which contain no salient object at all. To avoid the requirement of expensive pixel-wise salient region annotations, in this paper, we study weakly supervised learning approache…
Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）
Image saliency detection has recently witnessed rapid progress due to deep convolutional neural networks. However, none of the existing methods is able to identify object instances in the detected salient regions. In this paper, we present a salient instance segmentation method that produces a saliency mask with distinct object instance labels for an input image. Our method consists of three steps, estimating saliency map, detecting salient object contours and identifying salient object instances. For the first two steps, we propose a multiscale saliency refinement network, which generates hig…
City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）；Beijing Jiaotong University（北京交通大学）
Despite the remarkable advances in visual saliency analysis for natural scene images (NSIs), salient object detection (SOD) for optical remote sensing images (RSIs) still remains an open and challenging problem. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end Dense Attention Fluid Network (DAFNet) for SOD in optical RSIs. A Global Context-aware Attention (GCA) module is proposed to adaptively capture long-range semantic context relationships, and is further embedded in a Dense Attention Fluid (DAF) structure that enables shallow attention cues flow into deep layers to guide the generation of high-leve…
Typically, a salient object detection (SOD) model faces opposite requirements in processing object interiors and boundaries. The features of interiors should be invariant to strong appearance change so as to pop-out the salient object as a whole, while the features of boundaries should be selective to slight appearance change to distinguish salient objects and background. To address this selectivity-invariance dilemma, we propose a novel boundary-aware network with successive dilation for image-based SOD. In this network, the feature selectivity at boundaries is enhanced by incorporating a bou…
Recent deep learning based salient object detection methods which utilize both saliency and boundary features have achieved remarkable performance. However, most of them ignore the complementarity between saliency features and boundary features, thus get worse predictions in scenes with low contrast between foreground and background. To address this issue, we propose a novel Recurrent Two-Stream Guided Refinement Network (RTGRNet) that consists of iterating Two-Stream Guided Refinement Modules (TGRMs). TGRM consists of a Guide Block and two feature streams: saliency and boundary, the Guide Blo…
Existing salient object detection methods often adopt deeper and wider networks for better performance, resulting in heavy computational burden and slow inference speed. This inspires us to rethink saliency detection to achieve a favorable balance between efficiency and accuracy. To this end, we design a lightweight framework while maintaining satisfying competitive accuracy. Specifically, we propose a novel trilateral decoder framework by decoupling the U-shape structure into three complementary branches, which are devised to confront the dilution of semantic context, loss of spatial structur…
Fully convolutional networks (FCN) has significantly improved the performance of many pixel-labeling tasks, such as semantic segmentation and depth estimation. However, it still remains non-trivial to thoroughly utilize the multi-level convolutional feature maps and boundary information for salient object detection. In this paper, we propose a novel FCN framework to integrate multi-level convolutional features recurrently with the guidance of object boundary information. First, a deep convolutional network is used to extract multi-level feature maps and separately aggregate them into multiple …
Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）
Deep-learning based salient object detection methods achieve great progress. However, the variable scale and unknown category of salient objects are great challenges all the time. These are closely related to the utilization of multi-level and multi-scale features. In this paper, we propose the aggregate interaction modules to integrate the features from adjacent levels, in which less noise is introduced because of only using small up-/down-sampling rates. To obtain more efficient multi-scale features from the integrated features, the self-interaction modules are embedded in each decoder unit.…
Beijing Jiaotong University（北京交通大学）；City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Institute of High Performance Computing (IHPC), A*STAR（新加坡科技研究局高性能计算研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）
The goal of co-salient object detection (CoSOD) is to discover salient objects that commonly appear in a query group containing two or more relevant images. Therefore, how to effectively extract inter-image correspondence is crucial for the CoSOD task. In this paper, we propose a global-and-local collaborative learning architecture, which includes a global correspondence modeling (GCM) and a local correspondence modeling (LCM) to capture comprehensive inter-image corresponding relationship among different images from the global and local perspectives. Firstly, we treat different images as diff…
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence (IIAI)（人工智能初始研究所）；Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）
Existing CNNs-based salient object detection (SOD) heavily depends on the large-scale pixel-level annotations, which is labor-intensive, time-consuming, and expensive. By contrast, the sparse annotations become appealing to the salient object detection community. However, few efforts are devoted to learning salient object detection from sparse annotations, especially in the remote sensing field. In addition, the sparse annotation usually contains scanty information, which makes it challenging to train a well-performing model, resulting in its performance largely lagging behind the fully-superv…
Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学）；University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）
This paper proposes an Agile Aggregating Multi-Level feaTure framework (Agile Amulet) for salient object detection. The Agile Amulet builds on previous works to predict saliency maps using multi-level convolutional features. Compared to previous works, Agile Amulet employs some key innovations to improve training and testing speed while also increase prediction accuracy. More specifically, we first introduce a contextual attention module that can rapidly highlight most salient objects or regions with contextual pyramids. Thus, it effectively guides the learning of low-layer convolutional featu…
Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学）；Pengcheng Lab（鹏城实验室）
Benefiting from the spatial cues embedded in depth images, recent progress on RGB-D saliency detection shows impressive ability on some challenge scenarios. However, there are still two limitations. One hand is that the pooling and upsampling operations in FCNs might cause blur object boundaries. On the other hand, using an additional depth-network to extract depth features might lead to high computation and storage cost. The reliance on depth inputs during testing also limits the practical applications of current RGB-D models. In this paper, we propose a novel collaborative learning framework…
Liquid Fusion of Heterogeneous Representations Towards General Salient Object Detection
School of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, Changzhou University（常州大学计算机科学与人工智能学院）；College of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, Fudan University（复旦大学计算机科学与人工智能学院）；Faculty of Data Science, City University of Macau（澳门城市大学数据科学学院）
Tencent Jarvis Lab（腾讯Jarvis实验室）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
Automated salient object detection (SOD) plays an increasingly crucial role in many computer vision applications. By reformulating the depth information as supervision rather than as input, depth-supervised convolutional neural networks (CNN) have achieved promising results on both RGB and RGB-D SOD scenarios with the merits of no requirements for extra depth networks and depth inputs in the inference stage. This paper, for the first time, seeks to expand the applicability of depth supervision to the Transformer architecture. Specifically, we develop a Depth-supervised Fusion TRansformer (DFTR…
Seamless Detection: Unifying Salient Object Detection and Camouflaged Object Detection
School of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, Changzhou University（常州大学计算机科学与人工智能学院）；School of Automation, Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学自动化学院）；Department of Automation, Tsinghua University（清华大学自动化系）
Feature matters for salient object detection. Existing methods mainly focus on designing a sophisticated structure to incorporate multi-level features and filter out cluttered features. We present Progressive Feature Polishing Network (PFPN), a simple yet effective framework to progressively polish the multi-level features to be more accurate and representative. By employing multiple Feature Polishing Modules (FPMs) in a recurrent manner, our approach is able to detect salient objects with fine details without any post-processing. A FPM parallelly updates the features of each level by directly…
Although deep neural networks have achieved remarkable results for the task of semantic segmentation, they usually fail to generalize towards new domains, especially when performing synthetic-to-real adaptation. Such domain shift is particularly noticeable along class boundaries, invalidating one of the main goals of semantic segmentation that consists in obtaining sharp segmentation masks. In this work, we specifically address this core problem in the context of Unsupervised Domain Adaptation and present a novel low-level adaptation strategy that allows us to obtain sharp predictions. Moreove…
Top-down saliency models produce a probability map that peaks at target locations specified by a task/goal such as object detection. They are usually trained in a fully supervised setting involving pixel-level annotations of objects. We propose a weakly supervised top-down saliency framework using only binary labels that indicate the presence/absence of an object in an image. First, the probabilistic contribution of each image region to the confidence of a CNN-based image classifier is computed through a backtracking strategy to produce top-down saliency. From a set of saliency maps of an imag…
Fine-tuning a network which has been trained on a large dataset is an alternative to full training in order to overcome the problem of scarce and expensive data in medical applications. While the shallow layers of the network are usually kept unchanged, deeper layers are modified according to the new dataset. This approach may not work for ultrasound images due to their drastically different appearance. In this study, we investigated the effect of fine-tuning different layers of a U-Net which was trained on segmentation of natural images in breast ultrasound image segmentation. Tuning the cont…
Assisted Refinement Network Based on Channel Information Interaction for Camouflaged and Salient Object Detection
Department of Physics, J.K. Institute of Science（物理系，J.K.科学研究院）；World Scientific University（世界科学大学）；University of Intelligent Studies（智能研究大学）；School of Computer Science and Technology, Xinjiang University（计算机科学与技术学院，新疆大学）；Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University（电子工程系，清华大学）
Tianjin University（天津大学）；Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence（起源人工智能研究院）
Due to the advantages of real-time detection and improved performance, single-shot detectors have gained great attention recently. To solve the complex scale variations, single-shot detectors make scale-aware predictions based on multiple pyramid layers. However, the features in the pyramid are not scale-aware enough, which limits the detection performance. Two common problems in single-shot detectors caused by object scale variations can be observed: (1) small objects are easily missed; (2) the salient part of a large object is sometimes detected as an object. With this observation, we propos…
University of Exeter（埃克塞特大学）；Department of Computer Science University of Exeter（埃克塞特大学计算机科学系）
Saliency prediction is a well studied problem in computer vision. Early saliency models were based on low-level hand-crafted feature derived from insights gained in neuroscience and psychophysics. In the wake of deep learning breakthrough, a new cohort of models were proposed based on neural network architectures, allowing significantly higher gaze prediction than previous shallow models, on all metrics. However, most models treat the saliency prediction as a \textit{regression} problem, and accurate regression of high-dimensional data is known to be a hard problem. Furthermore, it is unclear …
Towards Size-invariant Salient Object Detection: A Generic Evaluation and Optimization Approach
School of Computer Science and Technology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（计算机科学与技术学院，中国科学院大学）；State Key Laboratory of AI Safety, Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（人工智能安全国家重点实验室，中国科学院计算技术研究所）；Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（网络安全学院，中国科学院大学）；School of Cyber Science and Technology, Shenzhen Campus of Sun Yat-sen University（网络安全科学与技术学院，中山大学深圳校区）
Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）；University of California, Merced（加州大学默塞德分校）
In saliency detection, every pixel needs contextual information to make saliency prediction. Previous models usually incorporate contexts holistically. However, for each pixel, usually only part of its context region is useful and contributes to its prediction, while some other part may serve as noises and distractions. In this paper, we propose a novel pixel-wise contextual attention network, \ie PiCANet, to learn to selectively attend to informative context locations at each pixel. Specifically, PiCANet generates an attention map over the context region of each pixel, where each attention we…
In this paper we propose two saliency models for salient object segmentation based on a hierarchical image segmentation, a tree-like structure that represents regions at different scales from the details to the whole image (e.g. gPb-UCM, BPT). The first model is based on a hierarchy of image partitions. The saliency at each level is computed on a region basis, taking into account the contrast between regions. The maps obtained for the different partitions are then integrated into a final saliency map. The second model directly works on the structure created by the segmentation algorithm, compu…
Hefei University of Technology（合肥工业大学）；University of Louisiana at Lafayette（路易斯安那大学拉斐特分校）
Due to object detection's close relationship with video analysis and image understanding, it has attracted much research attention in recent years. Traditional object detection methods are built on handcrafted features and shallow trainable architectures. Their performance easily stagnates by constructing complex ensembles which combine multiple low-level image features with high-level context from object detectors and scene classifiers. With the rapid development in deep learning, more powerful tools, which are able to learn semantic, high-level, deeper features, are introduced to address the…
Visual relationship detection aims to locate objects in images and recognize the relationships between objects. Traditional methods treat all observed relationships in an image equally, which causes a relatively poor performance in the detection tasks on complex images with abundant visual objects and various relationships. To address this problem, we propose an attention based model, namely AVR, to achieve salient visual relationships based on both local and global context of the relationships. Specifically, AVR recognizes relationships and measures the attention on the relationships in the l…
The abstract of the thesis consists of three sections, videlicet, Motivation Chapter Organization Salient Contributions. The complete abstract is included with the thesis. The final section on Salient Contributions is reproduced below. Salient Contributions The research presents the following salient contributions: i. A novel technique has been developed for comparing biographical information, by combining the average impact of Levenshtein, Damerau-Levenshtein, and editor distances. The impact is calculated as the ratio of the edit distance to the maximum possible edit distance between two str…
Feature maps in deep neural network generally contain different semantics. Existing methods often omit their characteristics that may lead to sub-optimal results. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end deep saliency network which could effectively utilize multi-scale feature maps according to their characteristics. Shallow layers often contain more local information, and deep layers have advantages in global semantics. Therefore, the network generates elaborate saliency maps by enhancing local and global information of feature maps in different layers. On one hand, local information of s…
Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya（加泰罗尼亚理工大学）；Insight Center for Data Analytics（洞察数据分析中心）；Dublin City University（都柏林城市大学）
The prediction of salient areas in images has been traditionally addressed with hand-crafted features based on neuroscience principles. This paper, however, addresses the problem with a completely data-driven approach by training a convolutional neural network (convnet). The learning process is formulated as a minimization of a loss function that measures the Euclidean distance of the predicted saliency map with the provided ground truth. The recent publication of large datasets of saliency prediction has provided enough data to train end-to-end architectures that are both fast and accurate. T…
BioMedIA, Imperial College London（帝国理工学院BioMedIA）；HeartFlow；Medical Informatics, University of Luebeck（吕贝克大学医学信息学）
We propose a novel attention gate (AG) model for medical image analysis that automatically learns to focus on target structures of varying shapes and sizes. Models trained with AGs implicitly learn to suppress irrelevant regions in an input image while highlighting salient features useful for a specific task. This enables us to eliminate the necessity of using explicit external tissue/organ localisation modules when using convolutional neural networks (CNNs). AGs can be easily integrated into standard CNN models such as VGG or U-Net architectures with minimal computational overhead while incre…
Shanghai University（上海大学）；JD AI Research（京东人工智能研究院）；NLPR, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所模式识别国家重点实验室）；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Science（中国科学院自动化研究所）
Most existing public face datasets, such as MS-Celeb-1M and VGGFace2, provide abundant information in both breadth (large number of IDs) and depth (sufficient number of samples) for training. However, in many real-world scenarios of face recognition, the training dataset is limited in depth, i.e. only two face images are available for each ID. $\textit{We define this situation as Shallow Face Learning, and find it problematic with existing training methods.}$ Unlike deep face data, the shallow face data lacks intra-class diversity. As such, it can lead to collapse of feature dimension and cons…
In this paper, we propose a robust tracking method based on the collaboration of a generative model and a discriminative classifier, where features are learned by shallow and deep architectures, respectively. For the generative model, we introduce a block-based incremental learning scheme, in which a local binary mask is constructed to deal with occlusion. The similarity degrees between the local patches and their corresponding subspace are integrated to formulate a more accurate global appearance model. In the discriminative model, we exploit the advances of deep learning architectures to lea…
JD AI Research（京东人工智能研究院）；Shanghai University（上海大学）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
With the recent development of deep convolutional neural networks and large-scale datasets, deep face recognition has made remarkable progress and been widely used in various applications. However, unlike the existing public face datasets, in many real-world scenarios of face recognition, the depth of training dataset is shallow, which means only two face images are available for each ID. With the non-uniform increase of samples, such issue is converted to a more general case, a.k.a long-tail face learning, which suffers from data imbalance and intra-class diversity dearth simultaneously. Thes…
Shallow Features Matter: Hierarchical Memory with Heterogeneous Interaction for Unsupervised Video Object Segmentation
Shanghai Key Lab of Intelligent Information Processing, College of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, Fudan University（上海智能信息处理重点实验室，计算机科学与人工智能学院，复旦大学）；The School of Computer Engineering and Science, Shanghai University（上海大学计算机工程与科学学院）
In this paper, we proposed an integrated model of semantic-aware and contrast-aware saliency combining both bottom-up and top-down cues for effective saliency estimation and eye fixation prediction. The proposed model processes visual information using two pathways. The first pathway aims to capture the attractive semantic information in images, especially for the presence of meaningful objects and object parts such as human faces. The second pathway is based on multi-scale on-line feature learning and information maximization, which learns an adaptive sparse representation for the input and d…
Brain tumor segmentation is a challenging problem in medical image analysis. The endpoint is to generate the salient masks that accurately identify brain tumor regions in an fMRI screening. In this paper, we propose a novel attention gate (AG model) for brain tumor segmentation that utilizes both the edge detecting unit and the attention gated network to highlight and segment the salient regions from fMRI images. This feature enables us to eliminate the necessity of having to explicitly point towards the damaged area(external tissue localization) and classify(classification) as per classical c…
Seabed-Net: A multi-task network for joint bathymetry estimation and seabed classification from remote sensing imagery in shallow waters
Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Technische Universität Berlin（技术大学柏林电子工程与计算机科学学院）；BIFOLD - Berlin Institute for the Foundations of Learning and Data（柏林学习与数据基础研究所）
The black-box nature of the deep networks makes the explanation for "why" they make certain predictions extremely challenging. Saliency maps are one of the most widely-used local explanation tools to alleviate this problem. One of the primary approaches for generating saliency maps is by optimizing a mask over the input dimensions so that the output of the network is influenced the most by the masking. However, prior work only studies such influence by removing evidence from the input. In this paper, we present iGOS++, a framework to generate saliency maps that are optimized for altering the o…
Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT（哈佛大学与麻省理工学院博德研究所）；Dana-Farber Cancer Institute（丹娜法伯癌症研究院）；Department of Biomedical Informatics, Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院生物医学信息学系）
Cancer diagnosis, prognosis, and therapeutic response predictions are based on morphological information from histology slides and molecular profiles from genomic data. However, most deep learning-based objective outcome prediction and grading paradigms are based on histology or genomics alone and do not make use of the complementary information in an intuitive manner. In this work, we propose Pathomic Fusion, an interpretable strategy for end-to-end multimodal fusion of histology image and genomic (mutations, CNV, RNA-Seq) features for survival outcome prediction. Our approach models pairwise…
This review gives an overview of the development of machine learning in geoscience. A thorough analysis of the co-developments of machine learning applications throughout the last 70 years relates the recent enthusiasm for machine learning to developments in geoscience. I explore the shift of kriging towards a mainstream machine learning method and the historic application of neural networks in geoscience, following the general trend of machine learning enthusiasm through the decades. Furthermore, this chapter explores the shift from mathematical fundamentals and knowledge in software developm…
