Low light images captured in a non-uniform illumination environment usually are degraded with the scene depth and the corresponding environment lights. This degradation results in severe object information loss in the degraded image modality, which makes the salient object detection more challenging due to low contrast property and artificial light influence. However, existing salient object detection models are developed based on the assumption that the images are captured under a sufficient brightness environment, which is impractical in real-world scenarios. In this work, we propose an image enhancement approach to facilitate the salient object detection in low light images. The proposed model directly embeds the physical lighting model into the deep neural network to describe the degradation of low light images, in which the environment light is treated as a point-wise variate and changes with local content. Moreover, a Non-Local-Block Layer is utilized to capture the difference of local content of an object against its local neighborhood favoring regions. To quantitative evaluation, we construct a low light Images dataset with pixel-level human-labeled ground-truth annotations and report promising results on four public datasets and our benchmark dataset.
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, …
Recently, general salient object detection (SOD) has made great progress with the rapid development of deep neural networks. However, task-aware SOD has hardly been studied due to the lack of task-specific datasets. In this paper, we construct a driving task-oriented dataset where pixel-level masks of salient objects have been annotated. Comparing with general SOD datasets, we find that the cross-domain knowledge difference and task-specific scene gap are two main challenges to focus the salient objects when driving. Inspired by these findings, we proposed a baseline model for the driving task…
Typically, objects with the same semantics are not always prominent in images containing different backgrounds. Motivated by this observation that accurately salient object detection is related to both foreground and background, we proposed a novel cooperative attention mechanism that jointly considers reciprocal relationships between background and foreground for efficient salient object detection. Concretely, we first aggregate the features at each side-out of traditional dilated FCN to extract the initial foreground and background local responses respectively. Then taking these responses as…
Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；Guangdong Province Key Laboratory of Information Security Technology（广东省信息安全技术重点实验室）；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）
Video salient object detection (VSOD) aims to locate and segment the most attractive object by exploiting both spatial cues and temporal cues hidden in video sequences. However, spatial and temporal cues are often unreliable in real-world scenarios, such as low-contrast foreground, fast motion, and multiple moving objects. To address these problems, we propose a new framework to adaptively capture available information from spatial and temporal cues, which contains Confidence-guided Adaptive Gate (CAG) modules and Dual Differential Enhancement (DDE) modules. For both RGB features and optical f…
Qingdao University（青岛大学）；Jiangxi University of Finance and Economics（江西财经大学）；Xidian University（西安电子科技大学）；Stony Brook University（石溪大学）
The current main stream methods formulate their video saliency mainly from two independent venues, i.e., the spatial and temporal branches. As a complementary component, the main task for the temporal branch is to intermittently focus the spatial branch on those regions with salient movements. In this way, even though the overall video saliency quality is heavily dependent on its spatial branch, however, the performance of the temporal branch still matter. Thus, the key factor to improve the overall video saliency is how to further boost the performance of these branches efficiently. In this p…
In this paper, our goal is salient building outline enhancement and extraction from images taken from consumer cameras using L0 smoothing. We address weak outlines and over-smoothing problem. Weak outlines are often undetected by edge extractors or easily smoothed out. We propose an iterative method, including the smoothing cell and sharpening cell. In the smoothing cell, we iteratively enlarge the smoothing level of the L0 smoothing. In the sharpening cell, we use Hough Transform to extract lines, based on the assumption that salient outlines for buildings are usually straight, and enhance th…
Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）；Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）
Salient object detection is subjective in nature, which implies that multiple estimations should be related to the same input image. Most existing salient object detection models are deterministic following a point to point estimation learning pipeline, making them incapable of estimating the predictive distribution. Although latent variable model based stochastic prediction networks exist to model the prediction variants, the latent space based on the single clean saliency annotation is less reliable in exploring the subjective nature of saliency, leading to less effective saliency divergence…
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…
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 extreme complexity of scale and shape as well as the uncertainty of the predicted location, salient object detection in optical remote sensing images (RSI-SOD) is a very difficult task. The existing SOD methods can satisfy the detection performance for natural scene images, but they are not well adapted to RSI-SOD due to the above-mentioned image characteristics in remote sensing images. In this paper, we propose a novel Attention Guided Network (AGNet) for SOD in optical RSIs, including position enhancement stage and detail refinement stage. Specifically, the position enhancement s…
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…
In recent years, there has been a rapid progress in solving the binary problems in computer vision, such as edge detection which finds the boundaries of an image and salient object detection which finds the important object in an image. This progress happened thanks to the rise of deep-learning and convolutional neural networks (CNN) which allow to extract complex and abstract features. However, edge detection and saliency are still two different fields and do not interact together, although it is intuitive for a human to detect salient objects based on its boundaries. Those features are not w…
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 …
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；University of California, Merced（加州大学默塞德分校）；Temple University（天普大学）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）
A key problem in salient object detection is how to effectively model the semantic properties of salient objects in a data-driven manner. In this paper, we propose a multi-task deep saliency model based on a fully convolutional neural network (FCNN) with global input (whole raw images) and global output (whole saliency maps). In principle, the proposed saliency model takes a data-driven strategy for encoding the underlying saliency prior information, and then sets up a multi-task learning scheme for exploring the intrinsic correlations between saliency detection and semantic image segmentation…
Co-salient object detection, with the target of detecting co-existed salient objects among a group of images, is gaining popularity. Recent works use the attention mechanism or extra information to aggregate common co-salient features, leading to incomplete even incorrect responses for target objects. In this paper, we aim to mine comprehensive co-salient features with democracy and reduce background interference without introducing any extra information. To achieve this, we design a democratic prototype generation module to generate democratic response maps, covering sufficient co-salient reg…
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 …
Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics（南京航空航天大学）；University of Leicester（莱斯特大学）
The semantic representation of deep features is essential for image context understanding, and effective fusion of features with different semantic representations can significantly improve the model's performance on salient object detection. In this paper, a novel method called MPI is proposed for salient object detection. Firstly, a multi-receptive enhancement module (MRE) is designed to effectively expand the receptive fields of features from different layers and generate features with different receptive fields. MRE can enhance the semantic representation and improve the model's perception…
Beijing Jiaotong University（北京交通大学）；Meituan（美团）；City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）
The popularity and promotion of depth maps have brought new vigor and vitality into salient object detection (SOD), and a mass of RGB-D SOD algorithms have been proposed, mainly concentrating on how to better integrate cross-modality features from RGB image and depth map. For the cross-modality interaction in feature encoder, existing methods either indiscriminately treat RGB and depth modalities, or only habitually utilize depth cues as auxiliary information of the RGB branch. Different from them, we reconsider the status of two modalities and propose a novel Cross-modality Discrepant Interac…
Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学）；Tiwaki Co.Ltd（Tiwaki株式会社）
Fully convolutional neural networks (FCNs) have shown outstanding performance in many dense labeling problems. One key pillar of these successes is mining relevant information from features in convolutional layers. However, how to better aggregate multi-level convolutional feature maps for salient object detection is underexplored. In this work, we present Amulet, a generic aggregating multi-level convolutional feature framework for salient object detection. Our framework first integrates multi-level feature maps into multiple resolutions, which simultaneously incorporate coarse semantics and …
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 …
Nankai University（南开大学）；IIAI（IIAI（阿联酋创新人工智能研究院））；Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；Terminus Group（特斯联集团）
Although current salient object detection (SOD) works have achieved significant progress, they are limited when it comes to the integrity of the predicted salient regions. We define the concept of integrity at both a micro and macro level. Specifically, at the micro level, the model should highlight all parts that belong to a certain salient object. Meanwhile, at the macro level, the model needs to discover all salient objects in a given image. To facilitate integrity learning for SOD, we design a novel Integrity Cognition Network (ICON), which explores three important components for learning …
Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；DarkMatter AI Research（暗物质人工智能研究院）；Shenzhen Research Institute of Big Data, the Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen)（香港中文大学（深圳）深圳大数据研究院）；Megvii Technology（旷视科技）
Deep learning-based video salient object detection has recently achieved great success with its performance significantly outperforming any other unsupervised methods. However, existing data-driven approaches heavily rely on a large quantity of pixel-wise annotated video frames to deliver such promising results. In this paper, we address the semi-supervised video salient object detection task using pseudo-labels. Specifically, we present an effective video saliency detector that consists of a spatial refinement network and a spatiotemporal module. Based on the same refinement network and motio…
SAMSOD: Rethinking SAM Optimization for RGB-T Salient Object Detection
Key Laboratory of Intelligent Computing and Signal Processing of Ministry of Education, School of Computer Science and Technology, Anhui University（教育部智能计算与信号处理重点实验室，计算机科学与技术学院，安徽大学）
RSONet: Region-guided Selective Optimization Network for RGB-T Salient Object Detection
School of Control Science and Engineering, Shandong University（控制科学与工程学院，山东大学）；Key Laboratory of Machine Intelligence and System Control, Ministry of Education（机器智能与系统控制重点实验室，教育部）；School of Automation, Hangzhou Dianzi University（自动化学院，杭州电子科技大学）；School of information engineering, Huzhou University（信息工程学院，湖州大学）；School of Data Science, Lingnan University（数据科学学院，岭南大学）
STENet: Superpixel Token Enhancing Network for RGB-D Salient Object Detection
School of Communication and Information Engineering, Shanghai University（上海大学通信与信息工程学院）；Yunnan Key Laboratory of Service Computing, Yunnan University of Finance and Economics（云南财经大学服务计算重点实验室）；Innovation Academy for Microsatellites of Chinese Academy of Science（中国科学院微卫星创新院）；Institute for Urban Governance, Shanghai University（上海大学城市治理研究院）
Existing RGB-D SOD methods mainly rely on a symmetric two-stream CNN-based network to extract RGB and depth channel features separately. However, there are two problems with the symmetric conventional network structure: first, the ability of CNN in learning global contexts is limited; second, the symmetric two-stream structure ignores the inherent differences between modalities. In this paper, we propose a Transformer-based asymmetric network (TANet) to tackle the issues mentioned above. We employ the powerful feature extraction capability of Transformer (PVTv2) to extract global semantic info…
GCoNet+: A Stronger Group Collaborative Co-Salient Object Detector
Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics（南京航空航天大学）；Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）；Aalto University（阿尔托大学）；ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；Kuaishou Technology（快手科技）；KU Leuven（鲁汶大学）
Texture-Semantic Collaboration Network for ORSI Salient Object Detection
Shanghai University（上海大学）；Shanghai Institute for Advanced Communication and Data Science（上海先进通信与数据科学研究院）；School of Communication and Information Engineering, Shanghai University（上海大学通信与信息工程学院）；Wenzhou Institute of Shanghai University（上海大学温州研究院）
Most existing CNN-based salient object detection methods can identify local segmentation details like hair and animal fur, but often misinterpret the real saliency due to the lack of global contextual information caused by the subjectiveness of the SOD task and the locality of convolution layers. Moreover, due to the unrealistically expensive labeling costs, the current existing SOD datasets are insufficient to cover the real data distribution. The limitation and bias of the training data add additional difficulty to fully exploring the semantic association between object-to-object and object-…
G2HFNet: GeoGran-Aware Hierarchical Feature Fusion Network for Salient Object Detection in Optical Remote Sensing Images
School of Control Science and Engineering, Shandong University（控制科学与工程学院，山东大学）；State Key Laboratory of Autonomous Intelligent Unmanned Systems（自主智能无人系统国家重点实验室）；School of Automation, Hangzhou Dianzi University（自动化学院，杭州电子科技大学）；School of information engineering, Huzhou University（信息工程学院，湖州大学）；School of Data Science, Lingnan University（数据科学学院，岭南大学）
DualGazeNet: A Biologically Inspired Dual-Gaze Query Network for Salient Object Detection
School of Computation, Information and Technology, Technical University of Munich（计算信息与技术学院，慕尼黑技术大学）；Department of Informatics, Technical University of Munich（信息学院，慕尼黑技术大学）；University Research and Innovation Center, Obuda University（奥布达大学研究与创新中心）；State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University Suzhou Campus（新型软件技术国家重点实验室，南京大学苏州校区）；School of Science and Technology, Nanjing University Suzhou Campus（科学与技术学院，南京大学苏州校区）；Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University（计算机科学与技术系，清华大学）
CONDA: Condensed Deep Association Learning for Co-Salient Object Detection
Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）；Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）；Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center（合肥综合性国家科学中心人工智能研究院）；Linköping University（林雪平大学）
Beyond Global Scanning: Adaptive Visual State Space Modeling for Salient Object Detection in Optical Remote Sensing Images
School of Computer Science and Technology, Hainan University（海南大学计算机科学与技术学院）；School of Control Science and Engineering, Shandong University（山东大学控制科学与工程学院）
Duke University（杜克大学）；Duke University Medical Center（杜克大学医学中心）
Salient object detection (SOD) is viewed as a pixel-wise saliency modeling task by traditional deep learning-based methods. A limitation of current SOD models is insufficient utilization of inter-pixel information, which usually results in imperfect segmentation near edge regions and low spatial coherence. As we demonstrate, using a saliency mask as the only label is suboptimal. To address this limitation, we propose a connectivity-based approach called bilateral connectivity network (BiconNet), which uses connectivity masks together with saliency masks as labels for effective modeling of inte…
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）
ViDSOD-100: A New Dataset and a Baseline Model for RGB-D Video Salient Object Detection
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州））；School of Informatics, Xiamen University（厦门大学信息学院）；Lingnan University（岭南大学）；Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR)（新加坡科学、技术与研究局）；Institute of High Performance Computing (IHPC)（高性能计算研究所）；School of Data and Computer Science, Sun Yat-Sen University（中山大学数据与计算机科学学院）
RDNet: Region Proportion-Aware Dynamic Adaptive Salient Object Detection Network in Optical Remote Sensing Images
School of Control Science and Engineering, Shandong University（控制科学与工程学院，山东大学）；Key Laboratory of Machine Intelligence and System Control, Ministry of Education（教育部智能信息与系统控制重点实验室）；School of Automation, Hangzhou Dianzi University（自动化学院，杭州电子科技大学）；School of Mathematics and Computer Science, Lishui University（数学与计算机科学学院，丽水大学）；School of Data Science, Lingnan University（数据科学学院，岭南大学）
College of Computer Science, Sichuan University（四川大学计算机学院）；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）
Images acquired by computer vision systems under low light conditions have multiple characteristics like high noise, lousy illumination, reflectance, and bad contrast, which make object detection tasks difficult. Much work has been done to enhance images using various pixel manipulation techniques, as well as deep neural networks - some focused on improving the illumination, while some on reducing the noise. Similarly, considerable research has been done in object detection neural network models. In our work, we break down the problem into two phases: 1)First, we explore which image enhancemen…
University of Manitoba（曼尼托巴大学）；Ryerson University（瑞尔森大学）
Much research has examined models for prediction of semantic labels or instances including dense pixel-wise prediction. The problem of predicting salient objects or regions of an image has also been examined in a similar light. With that said, there is an apparent relationship between these two problem domains in that the composition of a scene and associated semantic categories is certain to play into what is deemed salient. In this paper, we explore the relationship between these two problem domains. This is carried out in constructing deep neural networks that perform both predictions toget…
Referring Image Segmentation (RIS) aims at segmenting the target object from an image referred by one given natural language expression. The diverse and flexible expressions as well as complex visual contents in the images raise the RIS model with higher demands for investigating fine-grained matching behaviors between words in expressions and objects presented in images. However, such matching behaviors are hard to be learned and captured when the visual cues of referents (i.e. referred objects) are insufficient, as the referents with weak visual cues tend to be easily confused by cluttered b…
Tianjin University（天津大学）；Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学）；University of South Carolina（南卡罗来纳大学）
The existing still-static deep learning based saliency researches do not consider the weighting and highlighting of extracted features from different layers, all features contribute equally to the final saliency decision-making. Such methods always evenly detect all "potentially significant regions" and unable to highlight the key salient object, resulting in detection failure of dynamic scenes. In this paper, based on the fact that salient areas in videos are relatively small and concentrated, we propose a \textbf{key salient object re-augmentation method (KSORA) using top-down semantic knowl…
CosalPure: Learning Concept from Group Images for Robust Co-Saliency Detection
East China Normal University（华东师范大学）；New York University（纽约大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Shanghai Industrial Control Safety Innovation Tech. Co., Ltd（上海工业控制安全创新科技有限公司）
Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学）；Mila（米拉）；McGill University（麦吉尔大学）
Image captioning is a research hotspot where encoder-decoder models combining convolutional neural network (CNN) and long short-term memory (LSTM) achieve promising results. Despite significant progress, these models generate sentences differently from human cognitive styles. Existing models often generate a complete sentence from the first word to the end, without considering the influence of the following words on the whole sentence generation. In this paper, we explore the utilization of a human-like cognitive style, i.e., building overall cognition for the image to be described and the sen…
SPEEDNet: Salient Pyramidal Enhancement Encoder-Decoder Network for Colonoscopy Images
Indian Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) Jabalpur（印度贾巴尔普尔信息技术学院）；Gujarat Technological University（古吉拉特理工大学）；Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Roorkee（印度理工学院鲁尔基分校）；SVIMS Tirupati（蒂鲁帕蒂斯里文卡特斯瓦拉医学科学研究所）
Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院信息工程研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Image captioning is one of the most challenging tasks in AI, which aims to automatically generate textual sentences for an image. Recent methods for image captioning follow encoder-decoder framework that transforms the sequence of salient regions in an image into natural language descriptions. However, these models usually lack the comprehensive understanding of the contextual interactions reflected on various visual relationships between objects. In this paper, we explore explicit and implicit visual relationships to enrich region-level representations for image captioning. Explicitly, we bui…
Image enhancement is an important image processing technique that processes images suitably for a specific application e.g. image editing. The conventional solutions of image enhancement are grouped into two categories which are spatial domain processing method and transform domain processing method such as contrast manipulation, histogram equalization, homomorphic filtering. This paper proposes a new image enhance method based on dictionary learning. Particularly, the proposed method adjusts the image by manipulating the rarity of dictionary atoms. Firstly, learn the dictionary through sparse…
Underwater image enhancement has become an attractive topic as a significant technology in marine engineering and aquatic robotics. However, the limited number of datasets and imperfect hand-crafted ground truth weaken its robustness to unseen scenarios, and hamper the application to high-level vision tasks. To address the above limitations, we develop an efficient and compact enhancement network in collaboration with a high-level semantic-aware pretrained model, aiming to exploit its hierarchical feature representation as an auxiliary for the low-level underwater image enhancement. Specifical…
Generative adversarial network (GAN) for image super-resolution (SR) has attracted enormous interests in recent years. However, the GAN-based SR methods only use image discriminator to distinguish SR images and high-resolution (HR) images. Image discriminator fails to discriminate images accurately since image features cannot be fully expressed. In this paper, we design a new GAN-based SR framework GAN-IMC which includes generator, image discriminator, morphological component discriminator and color discriminator. The combination of multiple feature discriminators improves the accuracy of imag…
