Salient object detection in complex scenes and environments is a challenging research topic. Most works focus on RGB-based salient object detection, which limits its performance of real-life applications when confronted with adverse conditions such as dark environments and complex backgrounds. Taking advantage of RGB and thermal infrared images becomes a new research direction for detecting salient object in complex scenes recently, as thermal infrared spectrum imaging provides the complementary information and has been applied to many computer vision tasks. However, current research for RGBT salient object detection is limited by the lack of a large-scale dataset and comprehensive benchmark. This work contributes such a RGBT image dataset named VT5000, including 5000 spatially aligned RGBT image pairs with ground truth annotations. VT5000 has 11 challenges collected in different scenes and environments for exploring the robustness of algorithms. With this dataset, we propose a powerful baseline approach, which extracts multi-level features within each modality and aggregates these features of all modalities with the attention mechanism, for accurate RGBT salient object detection. Extensive experiments show that the proposed baseline approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on VT5000 dataset and other two public datasets. In addition, we carry out a comprehensive analysis of different algorithms of RGBT salient object detection on VT5000 dataset, and then make several valuable conclusions and provide some potential research directions for RGBT salient object detection.
Alignment-Free RGBT Salient Object Detection: Semantics-guided Asymmetric Correlation Network and A Unified Benchmark
Anhui University（安徽大学）；School of Computer Science and Technology（计算机科学与技术学院）；Anhui Provincial Key Laboratory of Multimodal Cognitive Computation（安徽省多模态认知计算重点实验室）；Information Materials and Intelligent Sensing Laboratory of Anhui Province（安徽省信息材料与智能感知实验室）
RGB-thermal salient object detection (SOD) aims to segment the common prominent regions of visible image and corresponding thermal infrared image that we call it RGBT SOD. Existing methods don't fully explore and exploit the potentials of complementarity of different modalities and multi-type cues of image contents, which play a vital role in achieving accurate results. In this paper, we propose a multi-interactive dual-decoder to mine and model the multi-type interactions for accurate RGBT SOD. In specific, we first encode two modalities into multi-level multi-modal feature representations. T…
Dual-Correlation Hypergraph Network for Unaligned RGBT Video Object Detection and A Large-scale Benchmark
Anhui Provincial Key Laboratory of Multimodal Cognitive Computation（安徽省多模态认知计算重点实验室）；School of Computer Science and Technology（计算机科学与技术学院）；Anhui University（安徽大学）；School of Artificial Intelligence（人工智能学院）
Graph-based Semantic Calibration Network for Unaligned UAV RGBT Image Semantic Segmentation and A Large-scale Benchmark
Key Laboratory of Intelligent Computing & Signal Processing (Anhui University), Ministry of Education（智能计算与信号处理重点实验室（安徽大学），教育部）；Anhui Provincial Key Laboratory of Multimodal Cognitive Computation, School of Artificial Intelligence, Anhui University（安徽省多模态认知计算重点实验室，人工智能学院，安徽大学）；School of Computer Science and Technology, Anhui University（计算机科学与技术学院，安徽大学）；GEOVIS Earth Technology Co., Ltd.（GEOVIS地球科技有限公司）
Salient object detection segments attractive objects in scenes. RGB and thermal modalities provide complementary information and scribble annotations alleviate large amounts of human labor. Based on the above facts, we propose a scribble-supervised RGB-T salient object detection model. By a four-step solution (expansion, prediction, aggregation, and supervision), label-sparse challenge of scribble-supervised method is solved. To expand scribble annotations, we collect the superpixels that foreground scribbles pass through in RGB and thermal images, respectively. The expanded multi-modal labels…
Learning Adaptive Fusion Bank for Multi-modal Salient Object Detection
Anhui University（安徽大学）；School of Computer Science and Technology, Anhui University（安徽大学计算机科学与技术学院）；School of Artificial Intelligence, Anhui University（安徽大学人工智能学院）；Institute of Physical Science and Information Technology, Anhui University（安徽大学物理科学与信息技术学院）
RGBT tracking receives a surge of interest in the computer vision community, but this research field lacks a large-scale and high-diversity benchmark dataset, which is essential for both the training of deep RGBT trackers and the comprehensive evaluation of RGBT tracking methods. To this end, we present a Large-scale High-diversity benchmark for RGBT tracking (LasHeR) in this work. LasHeR consists of 1224 visible and thermal infrared video pairs with more than 730K frame pairs in total. Each frame pair is spatially aligned and manually annotated with a bounding box, making the dataset well and…
Institut National des Sciences Appliquées de Rennes（雷恩国立应用科学学院）；Northeast Petroleum University（东北石油大学）
Salient human detection (SHD) in dynamic 360° immersive videos is of great importance for various applications such as robotics, inter-human and human-object interaction in augmented reality. However, 360° video SHD has been seldom discussed in the computer vision community due to a lack of datasets with large-scale omnidirectional videos and rich annotations. To this end, we propose SHD360, the first 360° video SHD dataset which contains various real-life daily scenes. Since so far there is no method proposed for 360° image/video SHD, we systematically benchmark 11 representative state-of-the…
Computer Science Department, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee（威斯康星大学密尔沃基分校计算机科学系）；CCCE & CS, Nankai University（南开大学CCCE与计算机学院）；Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学人工智能与机器人研究所）；State Key Laboratory of Virtual Reality Technology and Systems, School of Computer Science and Engineering, Beihang University（北京航空航天大学计算机学院虚拟现实技术与系统国家重点实验室）；International Research Institute for Multidisciplinary Science (IRIMS) at Beihang University（北京航空航天大学国际多学科科学研究所(IRIMS)（注：原机构名中“at Beihang University”为从属关系，中文翻译时保留核心机构名））
We extensively compare, qualitatively and quantitatively, 40 state-of-the-art models (28 salient object detection, 10 fixation prediction, 1 objectness, and 1 baseline) over 6 challenging datasets for the purpose of benchmarking salient object detection and segmentation methods. From the results obtained so far, our evaluation shows a consistent rapid progress over the last few years in terms of both accuracy and running time. The top contenders in this benchmark significantly outperform the models identified as the best in the previous benchmark conducted just two years ago. We find that the …
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…
Revisiting RGBT Tracking Benchmarks from the Perspective of Modality Validity: A New Benchmark, Problem, and Solution
School of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science, Jiangnan University（江南大学人工智能与计算机科学学院）；Centre for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing, University of Surrey（Surrey大学视觉、语音与信号处理中心）
Fixation prediction (FP) in panoramic contents has been widely investigated along with the booming trend of virtual reality (VR) applications. However, another issue within the field of visual saliency, salient object detection (SOD), has been seldom explored in 360° (or omnidirectional) images due to the lack of datasets representative of real scenes with pixel-level annotations. Toward this end, we collect 107 equirectangular panoramas with challenging scenes and multiple object classes. Based on the consistency between FP and explicit saliency judgements, we further manually annotate 1,165 …
DRGBT-1K: A Large-scale High-quality Benchmark for Dynamic RGBT Tracking
Anhui University（安徽大学）；State Key Laboratory of Opto-Electronic Information Acquisition and Protection Technology（光电子信息采集与保护技术国家重点实验室）；Anhui Provincial Key Laboratory of Security Artificial Intelligence（安徽省安全人工智能重点实验室）；Anhui Provincial Key Laboratory of Multimodal Cognitive Computation（安徽省多模态认知计算重点实验室）
Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；School of Computer Science and Engineering（计算机科学与工程学院）；Key Laboratory of Machine Intelligence and Advanced Computing, Ministry of Education（教育部机器智能与先进计算重点实验室）
In recent years, deep network-based methods have continuously refreshed state-of-the-art performance on Salient Object Detection (SOD) task. However, the performance discrepancy caused by different implementation details may conceal the real progress in this task. Making an impartial comparison is required for future researches. To meet this need, we construct a general SALient Object Detection (SALOD) benchmark to conduct a comprehensive comparison among several representative SOD methods. Specifically, we re-implement 14 representative SOD methods by using consistent settings for training. M…
Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；State Key Laboratory of Virtual Reality Technology and Systems（虚拟现实技术与系统国家重点实验室）；International Research Institute for Multidisciplinary Science（国际交叉科学研究院）
Image-based salient object detection (SOD) has been extensively studied in the past decades. However, video-based SOD is much less explored since there lack large-scale video datasets within which salient objects are unambiguously defined and annotated. Toward this end, this paper proposes a video-based SOD dataset that consists of 200 videos (64 minutes). In constructing the dataset, we manually annotate all objects and regions over 7,650 uniformly sampled keyframes and collect the eye-tracking data of 23 subjects that free-view all videos. From the user data, we find salient objects in video…
RDVSv2: A Large-scale Benchmark for RGB-D Video Salient Object Detection
National Key Laboratory of Fundamental Science on Synthetic Vision, Sichuan University（四川大学合成视觉基础科学国家重点实验室）；College of Computer Science, Sichuan University（四川大学计算机学院）
Nankai University（南开大学）；University of Central Florida（中佛罗里达大学）
We provide a comprehensive evaluation of salient object detection (SOD) models. Our analysis identifies a serious design bias of existing SOD datasets which assumes that each image contains at least one clearly outstanding salient object in low clutter. The design bias has led to a saturated high performance for state-of-the-art SOD models when evaluated on existing datasets. The models, however, still perform far from being satisfactory when applied to real-world daily scenes. Based on our analyses, we first identify 7 crucial aspects that a comprehensive and balanced dataset should fulfill. …
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…
Decoupled Cross-Modal Alignment Network for Text-RGBT Person Retrieval and A High-Quality Benchmark
School of Computer Science and Technology, Anhui University（安徽大学计算机科学与技术学院）；School of Artificial Intelligence, Anhui University（安徽大学人工智能学院）；National Key Laboratory of Opto-Electronic Information Acquisition and Protection Technology（光电信息采集与防护技术国家重点实验室）；Anhui Provincial Key Laboratory of Multimodal Cognitive Computation（安徽省多模态认知计算重点实验室）
Sichuan University（四川大学）；Wuhan University（武汉大学）；Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）；Nankai University（南开大学）
Salient object detection (SOD) is a long-standing research topic in computer vision and has drawn an increasing amount of research interest in the past decade. This paper provides the first comprehensive review and benchmark for light field SOD, which has long been lacking in the saliency community. Firstly, we introduce preliminary knowledge on light fields, including theory and data forms, and then review existing studies on light field SOD, covering ten traditional models, seven deep learning-based models, one comparative study, and one brief review. Existing datasets for light field SOD ar…
Conventional RGB-D salient object detection methods aim to leverage depth as complementary information to find the salient regions in both modalities. However, the salient object detection results heavily rely on the quality of captured depth data which sometimes are unavailable. In this work, we make the first attempt to solve the RGB-D salient object detection problem with a novel depth-awareness framework. This framework only relies on RGB data in the testing phase, utilizing captured depth data as supervision for representation learning. To construct our framework as well as achieving accu…
Salient object detection (SOD) is a crucial and preliminary task for many computer vision applications, which have made progress with deep CNNs. Most of the existing methods mainly rely on the RGB information to distinguish the salient objects, which faces difficulties in some complex scenarios. To solve this, many recent RGBD-based networks are proposed by adopting the depth map as an independent input and fuse the features with RGB information. Taking the advantages of RGB and RGBD methods, we propose a novel depth-aware salient object detection framework, which has following superior design…
University of Oxford（牛津大学）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）
In this paper, we tackle the challenging task of unsupervised salient object detection (SOD) by leveraging spectral clustering on self-supervised features. We make the following contributions: (i) We revisit spectral clustering and demonstrate its potential to group the pixels of salient objects; (ii) Given mask proposals from multiple applications of spectral clustering on image features computed from various self-supervised models, e.g., MoCov2, SwAV, DINO, we propose a simple but effective winner-takes-all voting mechanism for selecting the salient masks, leveraging object priors based on f…
WXSOD: A Benchmark for Robust Salient Object Detection in Adverse Weather Conditions
Department of Artificial Intelligence（人工智能学院）；School of Communication Engineering（通信工程学院）；School of Automation（自动化学院）；Department of Electronic Engineering（电子工程学院）
Recent works on salient object detection have made use of multi-scale features in a way such that high-level features and low-level features can collaborate in locating salient objects. Many of the previous methods have achieved great performance in salient object detection. By merging the high-level and low-level features, a large number of feature information can be extracted. Generally, they are doing these in a one-way framework, and interweaving the variable features all the way to the final feature output. Which may cause some blurring or inaccurate localization of saliency maps. To over…
Kyushu University（九州大学）；Graduate University for Advanced Studies (SOKENDAI)（综合研究大学院大学（SOKENDAI））；National Institute of Informatics（国立信息学研究所）
Focusing on only semantic instances that only salient in a scene gains more benefits for robot navigation and self-driving cars than looking at all objects in the whole scene. This paper pushes the envelope on salient regions in a video to decompose them into semantically meaningful components, namely, semantic salient instances. We provide the baseline for the new task of video semantic salient instance segmentation (VSSIS), that is, Semantic Instance - Salient Object (SISO) framework. The SISO framework is simple yet efficient, leveraging advantages of two different segmentation tasks, i.e. …
Co-salient object detection (Co-SOD) aims at discovering the common objects in a group of relevant images. Mining a co-representation is essential for locating co-salient objects. Unfortunately, the current Co-SOD method does not pay enough attention that the information not related to the co-salient object is included in the co-representation. Such irrelevant information in the co-representation interferes with its locating of co-salient objects. In this paper, we propose a Co-Representation Purification (CoRP) method aiming at searching noise-free co-representation. We search a few pixel-wis…
Salient object detection is a fundamental problem and has been received a great deal of attentions in computer vision. Recently deep learning model became a powerful tool for image feature extraction. In this paper, we propose a multi-scale deep neural network (MSDNN) for salient object detection. The proposed model first extracts global high-level features and context information over the whole source image with recurrent convolutional neural network (RCNN). Then several stacked deconvolutional layers are adopted to get the multi-scale feature representation and obtain a series of saliency ma…
Exploring to what humans pay attention in dynamic panoramic scenes is useful for many fundamental applications, including augmented reality (AR) in retail, AR-powered recruitment, and visual language navigation. With this goal in mind, we propose PV-SOD, a new task that aims to segment salient objects from panoramic videos. In contrast to existing fixation-/object-level saliency detection tasks, we focus on audio-induced salient object detection (SOD), where the salient objects are labeled with the guidance of audio-induced eye movements. To support this task, we collect the first large-scale …
Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence（起源人工智能研究院）；Nankai University（南开大学）
Salient object detection (SOD), which simulates the human visual perception system to locate the most attractive object(s) in a scene, has been widely applied to various computer vision tasks. Now, with the advent of depth sensors, depth maps with affluent spatial information that can be beneficial in boosting the performance of SOD, can easily be captured. Although various RGB-D based SOD models with promising performance have been proposed over the past several years, an in-depth understanding of these models and challenges in this topic remains lacking. In this paper, we provide a comprehen…
Deep convolutional neural network significantly boosted the capability of salient object detection in handling large variations of scenes and object appearances. However, convolution operations seek to generate strong responses on individual pixels, while lack the ability to maintain the spatial structure of objects. Moreover, the down-sampling operations, such as pooling and striding, lose spatial details of the salient objects. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective Siamese Edge-Enhancement Network (SE2Net) to preserve the edge structure for salient object detection. Specifically, …
AI Technology Lab, OPEN8 Singapore（AI技术实验室，OPEN8新加坡）
Contour information plays a vital role in salient object detection. However, excessive false positives remain in predictions from existing contour-based models due to insufficient contour-saliency fusion. In this work, we designed a network for better edge quality in salient object detection. We proposed a contour-saliency blending module to exchange information between contour and saliency. We adopted recursive CNN to increase contour-saliency fusion while keeping the total trainable parameters the same. Furthermore, we designed a stage-wise feature extraction module to help the model pick up…
Fully Convolutional Neural Network (FCN) has been widely applied to salient object detection recently by virtue of high-level semantic feature extraction, but existing FCN based methods still suffer from continuous striding and pooling operations leading to loss of spatial structure and blurred edges. To maintain the clear edge structure of salient objects, we propose a novel Edge-guided Non-local FCN (ENFNet) to perform edge guided feature learning for accurate salient object detection. In a specific, we extract hierarchical global and local information in FCN to incorporate non-local feature…
We present a simple yet effective progressive self-guided loss function to facilitate deep learning-based salient object detection (SOD) in images. The saliency maps produced by the most relevant works still suffer from incomplete predictions due to the internal complexity of salient objects. Our proposed progressive self-guided loss simulates a morphological closing operation on the model predictions for progressively creating auxiliary training supervisions to step-wisely guide the training process. We demonstrate that this new loss function can guide the SOD model to highlight more complete…
Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics（南京航空航天大学）；University of Leicester（莱斯特大学）
Due to the more dramatic multi-scale variations and more complicated foregrounds and backgrounds in optical remote sensing images (RSIs), the salient object detection (SOD) for optical RSIs becomes a huge challenge. However, different from natural scene images (NSIs), the discussion on the optical RSI SOD task still remains scarce. In this paper, we propose a multi-scale context network, namely MSCNet, for SOD in optical RSIs. Specifically, a multi-scale context extraction module is adopted to address the scale variation of salient objects by effectively learning multi-scale contextual informa…
Salient object detection or salient region detection models, diverging from fixation prediction models, have traditionally been dealing with locating and segmenting the most salient object or region in a scene. While the notion of most salient object is sensible when multiple objects exist in a scene, current datasets for evaluation of saliency detection approaches often have scenes with only one single object. We introduce three main contributions in this paper: First, we take an indepth look at the problem of salient object detection by studying the relationship between where people look in …
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）
This paper presents a new deep neural network design for salient object detection by maximizing the integration of local and global image context within, around, and beyond the salient objects. Our key idea is to adaptively propagate and aggregate the image context features with variable attenuation over the entire feature maps. To achieve this, we design the spatial attenuation context (SAC) module to recurrently translate and aggregate the context features independently with different attenuation factors and then to attentively learn the weights to adaptively integrate the aggregated context…
This paper presents a novel deep neural network framework for RGB-D salient object detection by controlling the message passing between the RGB images and depth maps on the feature level and exploring the long-range semantic contexts and geometric information on both RGB and depth features to infer salient objects. To achieve this, we formulate a dynamic message propagation (DMP) module with the graph neural networks and deformable convolutions to dynamically learn the context information and to automatically predict filter weights and affinity matrices for message propagation control. We furt…
Co-Salient Object Detection (CoSOD) aims at simulating the human visual system to discover the common and salient objects from a group of relevant images. Recent methods typically develop sophisticated deep learning based models have greatly improved the performance of CoSOD task. But there are still two major drawbacks that need to be further addressed, 1) sub-optimal inter-image relationship modeling; 2) lacking consideration of inter-image separability. In this paper, we propose the Co-Salient Object Detection Transformer (CoSformer) network to capture both salient and common visual pattern…
Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics（南京航空航天大学）；University of Leicester（莱斯特大学）
Deep-learning based salient object detection methods achieve great improvements. However, there are still problems existing in the predictions, such as blurry boundary and inaccurate location, which is mainly caused by inadequate feature extraction and integration. In this paper, we propose a Multi-scale Edge-based U-shape Network (MEUN) to integrate various features at different scales to achieve better performance. To extract more useful information for boundary prediction, U-shape Edge Network modules are embedded in each decoder units. Besides, the additional down-sampling module alleviate…
Benefit from the quick development of deep learning techniques, salient object detection has achieved remarkable progresses recently. However, there still exists following two major challenges that hinder its application in embedded devices, low resolution output and heavy model weight. To this end, this paper presents an accurate yet compact deep network for efficient salient object detection. More specifically, given a coarse saliency prediction in the deepest layer, we first employ residual learning to learn side-output residual features for saliency refinement, which can be achieved with v…
Oxford University（牛津大学）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）
Salient object detection has been attracting a lot of interest, and recently various heuristic computational models have been designed. In this paper, we formulate saliency map computation as a regression problem. Our method, which is based on multi-level image segmentation, utilizes the supervised learning approach to map the regional feature vector to a saliency score. Saliency scores across multiple levels are finally fused to produce the saliency map. The contributions lie in two-fold. One is that we propose a discriminate regional feature integration approach for salient object detection.…
Peking University Shenzhen Graduate School（北京大学深圳研究生院）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）
This paper researches the unexplored task-point cloud salient object detection (SOD). Differing from SOD for images, we find the attention shift of point clouds may provoke saliency conflict, i.e., an object paradoxically belongs to salient and non-salient categories. To eschew this issue, we present a novel view-dependent perspective of salient objects, reasonably reflecting the most eye-catching objects in point cloud scenarios. Following this formulation, we introduce PCSOD, the first dataset proposed for point cloud SOD consisting of 2,872 in-/out-door 3D views. The samples in our dataset …
Recent deep learning-based video salient object detection (VSOD) has achieved some breakthrough, but these methods rely on expensive annotated videos with pixel-wise annotations, weak annotations, or part of the pixel-wise annotations. In this paper, based on the similarities and the differences between VSOD and image salient object detection (SOD), we propose a novel VSOD method via a progressive framework that locates and segments salient objects in sequence without utilizing any video annotation. To use the knowledge learned in the SOD dataset for VSOD efficiently, we introduce dynamic sali…
We propose a novel Synergistic Attention Network (SA-Net) to address the light field salient object detection by establishing a synergistic effect between multi-modal features with advanced attention mechanisms. Our SA-Net exploits the rich information of focal stacks via 3D convolutional neural networks, decodes the high-level features of multi-modal light field data with two cascaded synergistic attention modules, and predicts the saliency map using an effective feature fusion module in a progressive manner. Extensive experiments on three widely-used benchmark datasets show that our SA-Net o…
The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；Deepwise AI Lab（深智云人工智能实验室）
Video salient object detection aims at discovering the most visually distinctive objects in a video. How to effectively take object motion into consideration during video salient object detection is a critical issue. Existing state-of-the-art methods either do not explicitly model and harvest motion cues or ignore spatial contexts within optical flow images. In this paper, we develop a multi-task motion guided video salient object detection network, which learns to accomplish two sub-tasks using two sub-networks, one sub-network for salient object detection in still images and the other for mo…
