Existing state-of-the-art saliency detection methods heavily rely on CNN-based architectures. Alternatively, we rethink this task from a convolution-free sequence-to-sequence perspective and predict saliency by modeling long-range dependencies, which can not be achieved by convolution. Specifically, we develop a novel unified model based on a pure transformer, namely, Visual Saliency Transformer (VST), for both RGB and RGB-D salient object detection (SOD). It takes image patches as inputs and leverages the transformer to propagate global contexts among image patches. Unlike conventional architectures used in Vision Transformer (ViT), we leverage multi-level token fusion and propose a new token upsampling method under the transformer framework to get high-resolution detection results. We also develop a token-based multi-task decoder to simultaneously perform saliency and boundary detection by introducing task-related tokens and a novel patch-task-attention mechanism. Experimental results show that our model outperforms existing methods on both RGB and RGB-D SOD benchmark datasets. Most importantly, our whole framework not only provides a new perspective for the SOD field but also shows a new paradigm for transformer-based dense prediction models. Code is available at https://github.com/nnizhang/VST.
Cognitive Computing Lab, Baidu Research（百度研究院认知计算实验室）；The Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）
Vision transformer networks have shown superiority in many computer vision tasks. In this paper, we take a step further by proposing a novel generative vision transformer with latent variables following an informative energy-based prior for salient object detection. Both the vision transformer network and the energy-based prior model are jointly trained via Markov chain Monte Carlo-based maximum likelihood estimation, in which the sampling from the intractable posterior and prior distributions of the latent variables are performed by Langevin dynamics. Further, with the generative vision trans…
Visual saliency is a fundamental problem in both cognitive and computational sciences, including computer vision. In this CVPR 2015 paper, we discover that a high-quality visual saliency model can be trained with multiscale features extracted using a popular deep learning architecture, convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which have had many successes in visual recognition tasks. For learning such saliency models, we introduce a neural network architecture, which has fully connected layers on top of CNNs responsible for extracting features at three different scales. We then propose a refineme…
Discriminative Co-Saliency and Background Mining Transformer 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）；Linköping University（林雪平大学）
Visual saliency, which predicts regions in the field of view that draw the most visual attention, has attracted a lot of interest from researchers. It has already been used in several vision tasks, e.g., image classification, object detection, foreground segmentation. Recently, the spectrum analysis based visual saliency approach has attracted a lot of interest due to its simplicity and good performance, where the phase information of the image is used to construct the saliency map. In this paper, we propose a new approach for detecting spatiotemporal visual saliency based on the phase spectru…
In the last few decades, significant achievements have been attained in predicting where humans look at images through different computational models. However, how to determine contributions of different visual features to overall saliency still remains an open problem. To overcome this issue, a recent class of models formulates saliency estimation as a supervised learning problem and accordingly apply machine learning techniques. In this paper, we also address this challenging problem and propose to use multiple kernel learning (MKL) to combine information coming from different feature dimens…
South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）
Humans tend to mine objects by learning from a group of images or several frames of video since we live in a dynamic world. In the computer vision area, many researches focus on co-segmentation (CoS), co-saliency detection (CoSD) and video salient object detection (VSOD) to discover the co-occurrent objects. However, previous approaches design different networks on these similar tasks separately, and they are difficult to apply to each other, which lowers the upper bound of the transferability of deep learning frameworks. Besides, they fail to take full advantage of the cues among inter- and i…
The problem of object localization and recognition on autonomous mobile robots is still an active topic. In this context, we tackle the problem of learning a model of visual saliency directly on a robot. This model, learned and improved on-the-fly during the robot's exploration provides an efficient tool for localizing relevant objects within their environment. The proposed approach includes two intertwined components. On the one hand, we describe a method for learning and incrementally updating a model of visual saliency from a depth-based object detector. This model of saliency can also be e…
Dr. Ing. h.c. F. Porsche AG（保时捷股份公司）；Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)（卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院）；NEC Laboratories Europe GmbH（NEC欧洲实验室有限公司）；Leibniz University Hannover（汉诺威莱布尼茨大学）
Provident detection of other road users at night has the potential for increasing road safety. For this purpose, humans intuitively use visual cues, such as light cones and light reflections emitted by other road users to be able to react to oncoming traffic at an early stage. This behavior can be imitated by computer vision methods by predicting the appearance of vehicles based on emitted light reflections caused by the vehicle's headlights. Since current object detection algorithms are mainly based on detecting directly visible objects annotated via bounding boxes, the detection and annotati…
Shandong University of Science and Technology（山东科技大学）
RGB-D SOD uses depth information to handle challenging scenes and obtain high-quality saliency maps. Existing state-of-the-art RGB-D saliency detection methods overwhelmingly rely on the strategy of directly fusing depth information. Although these methods improve the accuracy of saliency prediction through various cross-modality fusion strategies, misinformation provided by some poor-quality depth images can affect the saliency prediction result. To address this issue, a novel RGB-D salient object detection model (SiaTrans) is proposed in this paper, which allows training on depth image quali…
Riverside Research（里弗赛德研究所）；Indian Institute of Science（印度科学学院）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）
The ability to attend to salient regions of a visual scene is an innate and necessary preprocessing step for both biological and engineered systems performing high-level visual tasks (e.g. object detection, tracking, and classification). Computational efficiency, in regard to processing bandwidth and speed, is improved by only devoting computational resources to salient regions of the visual stimuli. In this paper, we first present a neuromorphic, bottom-up, dynamic visual saliency model based on the notion of proto-objects. This is achieved by incorporating the temporal characteristics of the…
University of Florida（佛罗里达大学）；University of Minnesota, Twin Cities（明尼苏达大学双城分校）
This paper presents a holistic approach to saliency-guided visual attention modeling (SVAM) for use by autonomous underwater robots. Our proposed model, named SVAM-Net, integrates deep visual features at various scales and semantics for effective salient object detection (SOD) in natural underwater images. The SVAM-Net architecture is configured in a unique way to jointly accommodate bottom-up and top-down learning within two separate branches of the network while sharing the same encoding layers. We design dedicated spatial attention modules (SAMs) along these learning pathways to exploit the…
Bosch Center for Artificial Intelligence（博世人工智能中心）
Recently, there has been a growing interest in developing saliency methods that provide visual explanations of network predictions. Still, the usability of existing methods is limited to image classification models. To overcome this limitation, we extend the existing approaches to generate grid saliencies, which provide spatially coherent visual explanations for (pixel-level) dense prediction networks. As the proposed grid saliency allows to spatially disentangle the object and its context, we specifically explore its potential to produce context explanations for semantic segmentation networks…
Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学）；UC Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；York University（约克大学）
RGB-D saliency detection integrates information from both RGB images and depth maps to improve prediction of salient regions under challenging conditions. The key to RGB-D saliency detection is to fully mine and fuse information at multiple scales across the two modalities. Previous approaches tend to apply the multi-scale and multi-modal fusion separately via local operations, which fails to capture long-range dependencies. Here we propose a transformer-based network to address this issue. Our proposed architecture is composed of two modules: a transformer-based within-modality feature enhanc…
360$^\circ$ video saliency detection is one of the challenging benchmarks for 360$^\circ$ video understanding since non-negligible distortion and discontinuity occur in the projection of any format of 360$^\circ$ videos, and capture-worthy viewpoint in the omnidirectional sphere is ambiguous by nature. We present a new framework named Panoramic Vision Transformer (PAVER). We design the encoder using Vision Transformer with deformable convolution, which enables us not only to plug pretrained models from normal videos into our architecture without additional modules or finetuning but also to per…
University of Catania（卡塔尼亚大学）；Simula Research Lab（Simula研究实验室）；University of Oslo（奥斯陆大学）
This paper presents an approach for top-down saliency detection guided by visual classification tasks. We first learn how to compute visual saliency when a specific visual task has to be accomplished, as opposed to most state-of-the-art methods which assess saliency merely through bottom-up principles. Afterwards, we investigate if and to what extent visual saliency can support visual classification in nontrivial cases. To achieve this, we propose SalClassNet, a CNN framework consisting of two networks jointly trained: a) the first one computing top-down saliency maps from input images, and b)…
In this paper we propose a Kalman filter aided saliency detection model which is based on the conjecture that salient regions are considerably different from our "visual expectation" or they are "visually surprising" in nature. In this work, we have structured our model with an immediate objective to predict saliency in static images. However, the proposed model can be easily extended for space-time saliency prediction. Our approach was evaluated using two publicly available benchmark data sets and results have been compared with other existing saliency models. The results clearly illustrate t…
This paper studies audio-visual deep saliency prediction. It introduces a conceptually simple and effective Deep Audio-Visual Embedding for dynamic saliency prediction dubbed ``DAVE" in conjunction with our efforts towards building an Audio-Visual Eye-tracking corpus named ``AVE". Despite existing a strong relation between auditory and visual cues for guiding gaze during perception, video saliency models only consider visual cues and neglect the auditory information that is ubiquitous in dynamic scenes. Here, we investigate the applicability of audio cues in conjunction with visual ones in pre…
We propose a framework inspired by biological vision systems to produce saliency maps of digital images. Well-known computational models for receptive fields of areas in the visual cortex that are specialized for color and orientation perception are used. To model the connectivity between these areas we use the CARLsim library which is a spiking neural network(SNN) simulator. The spikes generated by CARLsim, then serve as extracted features and input to our saliency detection algorithm. This new method of saliency detection is described and applied to benchmark images.
Tianjin University（天津大学）；University of Warwick（华威大学）
This paper studies the task of matching image and sentence, where learning appropriate representations across the multi-modal data appears to be the main challenge. Unlike previous approaches that predominantly deploy symmetrical architecture to represent both modalities, we propose Saliency-guided Attention Network (SAN) that asymmetrically employs visual and textual attention modules to learn the fine-grained correlation intertwined between vision and language. The proposed SAN mainly includes three components: saliency detector, Saliency-weighted Visual Attention (SVA) module, and Saliency-…
Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；DATA61, CSIRO（联邦科学与工业研究组织数据61所）
Human eyes concentrate different facial regions during distinct cognitive activities. We study utilising facial visual saliency maps to classify different facial expressions into different emotions. Our results show that our novel method of merely using facial saliency maps can achieve a descent accuracy of 65\%, much higher than the chance level of $1/7$. Furthermore, our approach is of semi-supervision, i.e., our facial saliency maps are generated from a general saliency prediction algorithm that is not explicitly designed for face images. We also discovered that the classification accuracie…
This paper presents a significant contribution to the field of repetitive action counting through the introduction of a new approach called Pose Saliency Representation. The proposed method efficiently represents each action using only two salient poses instead of redundant frames, which significantly reduces the computational cost while improving the performance. Moreover, we introduce a pose-level method, PoseRAC, which is based on this representation and achieves state-of-the-art performance on two new version datasets by using Pose Saliency Annotation to annotate salient poses for training…
We propose a novel image retrieval framework for visual saliency detection using information about salient objects contained within bounding box annotations for similar images. For each test image, we train a customized SVM from similar example images to predict the saliency values of its object proposals and generate an external saliency map (ES) by aggregating the regional scores. To overcome limitations caused by the size of the training dataset, we also propose an internal optimization module which computes an internal saliency map (IS) by measuring the low-level contrast information of th…
University of Mons (UMONS)（蒙斯大学）；Faculty of Engineering (FPMs)（工程学院）
Since the early 2000s, computational visual saliency has been a very active research area. Each year, more and more new models are published in the main computer vision conferences. Nowadays, one of the big challenges is to find a way to fairly evaluate all of these models. In this paper, a new framework is proposed to assess models of visual saliency. This evaluation is divided into three experiments leading to the proposition of a new evaluation framework. Each experiment is based on a basic question: 1) there are two ground truths for saliency evaluation: what are the differences between ey…
Mixup is a commonly adopted data augmentation technique for image classification. Recent advances in mixup methods primarily focus on mixing based on saliency. However, many saliency detectors require intense computation and are especially burdensome for parameter-heavy transformer models. To this end, we propose TokenMixup, an efficient attention-guided token-level data augmentation method that aims to maximize the saliency of a mixed set of tokens. TokenMixup provides x15 faster saliency-aware data augmentation compared to gradient-based methods. Moreover, we introduce a variant of TokenMixu…
Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；the University of Hong Kong（香港大学）
Visual saliency is a fundamental problem in both cognitive and computational sciences, including computer vision. In this paper, we discover that a high-quality visual saliency model can be learned from multiscale features extracted using deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which have had many successes in visual recognition tasks. For learning such saliency models, we introduce a neural network architecture, which has fully connected layers on top of CNNs responsible for feature extraction at three different scales. The penultimate layer of our neural network has been confirmed to be a…
Tongji University（同济大学）；the University of Hong Kong（香港大学）
Vision-based object tracking has boosted extensive autonomous applications for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). However, the dynamic changes in flight maneuver and viewpoint encountered in UAV tracking pose significant difficulties, e.g. , aspect ratio change, and scale variation. The conventional cross-correlation operation, while commonly used, has limitations in effectively capturing perceptual similarity and incorporates extraneous background information. To mitigate these limitations, this work presents a novel saliency-guided dynamic vision Transformer (SGDViT) for UAV tracking. The prop…
University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学）；TELUS Communications Incorporation（TELUS通信公司）
Saliency prediction for Standard Dynamic Range (SDR) videos has been well explored in the last decade. However, limited studies are available on High Dynamic Range (HDR) Visual Attention Models (VAMs). Considering that the characteristic of HDR content in terms of dynamic range and color gamut is quite different than those of SDR content, it is essential to identify the importance of different saliency attributes of HDR videos for designing a VAM and understand how to combine these features. To this end we propose a learning-based visual saliency fusion method for HDR content (LVBS-HDR) to com…
International Institute for Information Technology, Hyderabad（海得拉巴国际信息技术学院）；University of Canberra（堪培拉大学）
We propose the ViNet architecture for audio-visual saliency prediction. ViNet is a fully convolutional encoder-decoder architecture. The encoder uses visual features from a network trained for action recognition, and the decoder infers a saliency map via trilinear interpolation and 3D convolutions, combining features from multiple hierarchies. The overall architecture of ViNet is conceptually simple; it is causal and runs in real-time (60 fps). ViNet does not use audio as input and still outperforms the state-of-the-art audio-visual saliency prediction models on nine different datasets (three …
The University of Nottingham, Malaysia Campus（诺丁汉大学马来西亚校区）；Edith Cowan University（伊迪斯科文大学）；The University of Nottingham, UK Campus（诺丁汉大学英国校区）；Sunway University（双威大学）
Bottom-up saliency, an early human visual processing, behaves like binary classification of interest and null hypothesis. Its discriminant power, mutual information of image features and class distribution, is closely related to saliency value by the well-known centre-surround theory. As classification accuracy very much depends on window sizes, the discriminant saliency (power) varies according to sampling scales. Discriminating power estimation in multi-scales framework needs integrating with wavelet transformation and then estimating statistical discrepancy of two consecutive scales (centre…
School of Electrical and Information Engineering, Tianjin University（天津大学电气与信息工程学院）；Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence（Inception人工智能研究所）；School of Computer and Control Engineering, Nankai University（南开大学计算机与控制工程学院）；School of Computer Science Engineering, Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学计算机科学与工程学院）；School of Computer and Control Engineering, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学计算机与控制工程学院）
Visual saliency detection model simulates the human visual system to perceive the scene, and has been widely used in many vision tasks. With the acquisition technology development, more comprehensive information, such as depth cue, inter-image correspondence, or temporal relationship, is available to extend image saliency detection to RGBD saliency detection, co-saliency detection, or video saliency detection. RGBD saliency detection model focuses on extracting the salient regions from RGBD images by combining the depth information. Co-saliency detection model introduces the inter-image corres…
University of Exeter（埃克塞特大学）；Aalto University（阿尔托大学）；MarkableAI（MarkableAI公司）
Recently, data-driven deep saliency models have achieved high performance and have outperformed classical saliency models, as demonstrated by results on datasets such as the MIT300 and SALICON. Yet, there remains a large gap between the performance of these models and the inter-human baseline. Some outstanding questions include what have these models learned, how and where they fail, and how they can be improved. This article attempts to answer these questions by analyzing the representations learned by individual neurons located at the intermediate layers of deep saliency models. To this end,…
Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）；Ningbo Institute of Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学宁波研究院）；Nanchang University（南昌大学）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）
Incorporating the audio stream enables Video Saliency Prediction (VSP) to imitate the selective attention mechanism of human brain. By focusing on the benefits of joint auditory and visual information, most VSP methods are capable of exploiting semantic correlation between vision and audio modalities but ignoring the negative effects due to the temporal inconsistency of audio-visual intrinsics. Inspired by the biological inconsistency-correction within multi-sensory information, in this study, a consistency-aware audio-visual saliency prediction network (CASP-Net) is proposed, which takes a co…
Traditional gaze estimation methods typically require explicit user calibration to achieve high accuracy. This process is cumbersome and recalibration is often required when there are changes in factors such as illumination and pose. To address this challenge, we introduce SalGaze, a framework that utilizes saliency information in the visual content to transparently adapt the gaze estimation algorithm to the user without explicit user calibration. We design an algorithm to transform a saliency map into a differentiable loss map that can be used for the optimization of CNN-based models. SalGaze…
Recently, with the advent of deep convolutional neural networks (DCNN), the improvements in visual saliency prediction research are impressive. One possible direction to approach the next improvement is to fully characterize the multi-scale saliency-influential factors with a computationally-friendly module in DCNN architectures. In this work, we proposed an end-to-end dilated inception network (DINet) for visual saliency prediction. It captures multi-scale contextual features effectively with very limited extra parameters. Instead of utilizing parallel standard convolutions with different ker…
University of Vienna（维也纳大学）；University of Göttingen（哥廷根大学）
Saliency maps are used to understand human attention and visual fixation. However, while very well established for static images, there is no general agreement on how to compute a saliency map of dynamic scenes. In this paper we propose a mathematically rigorous approach to this prob- lem, including static saliency maps of each video frame for the calculation of the optical flow. Taking into account static saliency maps for calculating the optical flow allows for overcoming the aperture problem. Our ap- proach is able to explain human fixation behavior in situations which pose challenges to st…
Nearly all existing visual saliency models by far have focused on predicting a universal saliency map across all observers. Yet psychology studies suggest that visual attention of different observers can vary significantly under specific circumstances, especially a scene is composed of multiple salient objects. To study such heterogenous visual attention pattern across observers, we first construct a personalized saliency dataset and explore correlations between visual attention, personal preferences, and image contents. Specifically, we propose to decompose a personalized saliency map (referr…
Institute of Automation, National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学自动化研究所）；Centre for Intelligent Machines, McGill University（麦吉尔大学智能机器中心）
We address the issue of visual saliency from three perspectives. First, we consider saliency detection as a frequency domain analysis problem. Second, we achieve this by employing the concept of {\it non-saliency}. Third, we simultaneously consider the detection of salient regions of different size. The paper proposes a new bottom-up paradigm for detecting visual saliency, characterized by a scale-space analysis of the amplitude spectrum of natural images. We show that the convolution of the {\it image amplitude spectrum} with a low-pass Gaussian kernel of an appropriate scale is equivalent to…
Relevance-guided Audio Visual Fusion for Video Saliency Prediction
School of Computer Science, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology（南京信息工程大学计算机科学学院）；Jiangsu Collaborative Innovation Center of Atmospheric Environment and Equipment Technology, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology（南京信息工程大学江苏省大气环境与装备技术协同创新中心）；College of Computer and Technology, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics（南京航空航天大学计算机科学与技术学院）
Visual saliency models have recently begun to incorporate deep learning to achieve predictive capacity much greater than previous unsupervised methods. However, most existing models predict saliency using local mechanisms limited to the receptive field of the network. We propose a model that incorporates global scene semantic information in addition to local information gathered by a convolutional neural network. Our model is formulated as a mixture of experts. Each expert network is trained to predict saliency for a set of closely related images. The final saliency map is computed as a weight…
Cardiff University（卡迪夫大学）；Robert Gordon University（罗伯特戈登大学）；University of Konstanz（康斯坦茨大学）
Visual saliency prediction using transformers - Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have significantly advanced computational modelling for saliency prediction. However, accurately simulating the mechanisms of visual attention in the human cortex remains an academic challenge. It is critical to integrate properties of human vision into the design of CNN architectures, leading to perceptually more relevant saliency prediction. Due to the inherent inductive biases of CNN architectures, there is a lack of sufficient long-range contextual encoding capacity. This hinders CNN-based saliency models …
Computer Vision Center, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona（巴塞罗那自治大学计算机视觉中心）
Lateral connections in the primary visual cortex (V1) have long been hypothesized to be responsible of several visual processing mechanisms such as brightness induction, chromatic induction, visual discomfort and bottom-up visual attention (also named saliency). Many computational models have been developed to independently predict these and other visual processes, but no computational model has been able to reproduce all of them simultaneously. In this work we show that a biologically plausible computational model of lateral interactions of V1 is able to simultaneously predict saliency and al…
Spherical Vision Transformers for Audio-Visual Saliency Prediction in 360-Degree Videos
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Koç University（计算机科学与工程系，科克大学）；Department of Psychology, Boğaziçi University（心理学系，博多伊大学）；National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Intelligent Platforms Research Institute（国家先进工业科学与技术研究院（AIST），智能平台研究机构）；Department of Psychology, Boğaziçi University University（心理学系，博多伊大学）；Department of Computer Engineering, Hacettepe University（计算机工程系，哈切塞特佩大学）；KUIS AI Center（KUIS人工智能中心）
We introduce STAViS, a spatio-temporal audiovisual saliency network that combines spatio-temporal visual and auditory information in order to efficiently address the problem of saliency estimation in videos. Our approach employs a single network that combines visual saliency and auditory features and learns to appropriately localize sound sources and to fuse the two saliencies in order to obtain a final saliency map. The network has been designed, trained end-to-end, and evaluated on six different databases that contain audiovisual eye-tracking data of a large variety of videos. We compare our…
