Boosting Salient Object Detection with Transformer-based Asymmetric Bilateral U-Net
Nankai University（南开大学）；Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR)（新加坡科技研究局）；Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R)（资讯通信研究院）；University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC)（电子科技大学）
Yu Qiu, Yun Liu, Le Zhang, Jing Xu
备注：
Accepted by IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (TCSVT)
Existing salient object detection (SOD) methods mainly rely on U-shaped convolution neural networks (CNNs) with skip connections to combine the global contexts and local spatial details that are crucial for locating salient objects and refining object details, respectively. Despite great successes, the ability of CNNs in learning global contexts is limited. Recently, the vision transformer has achieved revolutionary progress in computer vision owing to its powerful modeling of global dependencies. However, directly applying the transformer to SOD is suboptimal because the transformer lacks the ability to learn local spatial representations. To this end, this paper explores the combination of transformers and CNNs to learn both global and local representations for SOD. We propose a transformer-based Asymmetric Bilateral U-Net (ABiU-Net). The asymmetric bilateral encoder has a transformer path and a lightweight CNN path, where the two paths communicate at each encoder stage to learn complementary global contexts and local spatial details, respectively. The asymmetric bilateral decoder also consists of two paths to process features from the transformer and CNN encoder paths, with communication at each decoder stage for decoding coarse salient object locations and fine-grained object details, respectively. Such communication between the two encoder/decoder paths enables AbiU-Net to learn complementary global and local representations, taking advantage of the natural merits of transformers and CNNs, respectively. Hence, ABiU-Net provides a new perspective for transformer-based SOD. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ABiU-Net performs favorably against previous state-of-the-art SOD methods. The code is available at https://github.com/yuqiuyuqiu/ABiU-Net.
Most existing RGB-D salient object detection (SOD) methods focus on the foreground region when utilizing the depth images. However, the background also provides important information in traditional SOD methods for promising performance. To better explore salient information in both foreground and background regions, this paper proposes a Bilateral Attention Network (BiANet) for the RGB-D SOD task. Specifically, we introduce a Bilateral Attention Module (BAM) with a complementary attention mechanism: foreground-first (FF) attention and background-first (BF) attention. The FF attention focuses o…
State Key Laboratory of Virtual Reality Technology and Systems, SCSE, Beihang University（北京航空航天大学虚拟现实技术与系统国家重点实验室）；Pengcheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）
Salient object detection requires a comprehensive and scalable receptive field to locate the visually significant objects in the image. Recently, the emergence of visual transformers and multi-branch modules has significantly enhanced the ability of neural networks to perceive objects at different scales. However, compared to the traditional backbone, the calculation process of transformers is time-consuming. Moreover, different branches of the multi-branch modules could cause the same error back propagation in each training iteration, which is not conducive to extracting discriminative featur…
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…
Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）；Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；CSIRO Australia（澳大利亚联邦科学与工业研究组织）；Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence（起源人工智能研究院）
Significant performance improvement has been achieved for fully-supervised video salient object detection with the pixel-wise labeled training datasets, which are time-consuming and expensive to obtain. To relieve the burden of data annotation, we present the first weakly supervised video salient object detection model based on relabeled "fixation guided scribble annotations". Specifically, an "Appearance-motion fusion module" and bidirectional ConvLSTM based framework are proposed to achieve effective multi-modal learning and long-term temporal context modeling based on our new weak annotatio…
South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）；Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学）
In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective approach, named Triple Excitation Network, to reinforce the training of video salient object detection (VSOD) from three aspects, spatial, temporal, and online excitations. These excitation mechanisms are designed following the spirit of curriculum learning and aim to reduce learning ambiguities at the beginning of training by selectively exciting feature activations using ground truth. Then we gradually reduce the weight of ground truth excitations by a curriculum rate and replace it by a curriculum complementary map for better and faster conve…
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…
Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；ACRV（澳大利亚机器人视觉中心）；Data61（数据61）；University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）；Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）
Compared with laborious pixel-wise dense labeling, it is much easier to label data by scribbles, which only costs 1$\sim$2 seconds to label one image. However, using scribble labels to learn salient object detection has not been explored. In this paper, we propose a weakly-supervised salient object detection model to learn saliency from such annotations. In doing so, we first relabel an existing large-scale salient object detection dataset with scribbles, namely S-DUTS dataset. Since object structure and detail information is not identified by scribbles, directly training with scribble labels …
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…
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (GZ)（香港科技大学（广州））；Institute of High Performance Computing (IHPC), Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR)（新加坡科技研究局高性能计算研究院）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）
Training deep models for RGB-D salient object detection (SOD) often requires a large number of labeled RGB-D images. However, RGB-D data is not easily acquired, which limits the development of RGB-D SOD techniques. To alleviate this issue, we present a Dual-Semi RGB-D Salient Object Detection Network (DS-Net) to leverage unlabeled RGB images for boosting RGB-D saliency detection. We first devise a depth decoupling convolutional neural network (DDCNN), which contains a depth estimation branch and a saliency detection branch. The depth estimation branch is trained with RGB-D images and then used…
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）；CETC Special Mission Aircraft System Engineering Co.,Ltd（中国电子科技集团特种任务飞机系统工程有限公司）
Depth cues with affluent spatial information have been proven beneficial in boosting salient object detection (SOD), while the depth quality directly affects the subsequent SOD performance. However, it is inevitable to obtain some low-quality depth cues due to limitations of its acquisition devices, which can inhibit the SOD performance. Besides, existing methods tend to combine RGB images and depth cues in a direct fusion or a simple fusion module, which makes they can not effectively exploit the complex correlations between the two sources. Moreover, few methods design an appropriate module …
State Key Laboratory of Virtual Reality Technology and Systems, Beihang University（北京航空航天大学虚拟现实技术与系统国家重点实验室）；School of Transportation Science and Engineering, Beihang University（北京航空航天大学交通科学与工程学院）；Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen)（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳））；SenseTime Research（商汤科技研究院）；China University of Petroleum (East China)（中国石油大学（华东））；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；Case Western Reserve University（凯斯西储大学）
Although weakly-supervised techniques can reduce the labeling effort, it is unclear whether a saliency model trained with weakly-supervised data (e.g., point annotation) can achieve the equivalent performance of its fully-supervised version. This paper attempts to answer this unexplored question by proving a hypothesis: there is a point-labeled dataset where saliency models trained on it can achieve equivalent performance when trained on the densely annotated dataset. To prove this conjecture, we proposed a novel yet effective adversarial trajectory-ensemble active learning (ATAL). Our contrib…
Efficient Fourier Filtering Network with Contrastive Learning for AAV-based Unaligned Bimodal Salient Object Detection
Faculty of Robot Science and Engineering, Northeastern University（机器人科学与工程学院，东北大学）；College of Computing and Data Science, Nanyang Technological University（计算与数据科学学院，南洋理工大学）
Boosting Segment Anything Model to Generalize Visually Non-Salient Scenarios
Unmanned System Research Institute at Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学无人系统研究院）；School of Electronic, Electrical, and Communication Engineering, University of Chinese Academic of Sciences（中国科学院大学电子电气与通信工程学院）；Max Planck Institute for Informatics (MPI-INF)（马克斯·普朗克研究所（信息研究所））；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学计算机科学与工程学院）；CVL, ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院计算机视觉实验室）；School of Computer Science and Engineering, Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学计算机科学与工程学院）；School of Computer Science and Engineering, Southeast University（东南大学计算机科学与工程学院）；Institute of High Performance Computing, Agency for Science, Technology and Research（新加坡科技研究局高性能计算研究院）
Salient object detection (SOD) on RGB and depth images has attracted more and more research interests, due to its effectiveness and the fact that depth cues can now be conveniently captured. Existing RGB-D SOD models usually adopt different fusion strategies to learn a shared representation from the two modalities (\ie, RGB and depth), while few methods explicitly consider how to preserve modality-specific characteristics. In this study, we propose a novel framework, termed SPNet} (Specificity-preserving network), which benefits SOD performance by exploring both the shared information and moda…
Department of Forest Sciences, University of Helsinki（赫尔辛基大学森林科学系）；School of Computer Science, National Engineering Research Center for Multimedia Software, Institute of Artificial Intelligence, and Hubei Key Laboratory of Multimedia and Network Communication Engineering, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China（武汉大学计算机学院、国家多媒体软件工程研究中心、人工智能研究院、湖北省多媒体与网络通信工程重点实验室，武汉，中国）
Beijing Jiaotong University（北京交通大学）；Sun Yatsen University（中山大学）；Adobe Research（Adobe研究院）；Nankai University（南开大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）
Recently, significant improvement has been made on semantic object segmentation due to the development of deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs). Training such a DCNN usually relies on a large number of images with pixel-level segmentation masks, and annotating these images is very costly in terms of both finance and human effort. In this paper, we propose a simple to complex (STC) framework in which only image-level annotations are utilized to learn DCNNs for semantic segmentation. Specifically, we first train an initial segmentation network called Initial-DCNN with the saliency maps of s…
STCMOT: Spatio-Temporal Cohesion Learning for UAV-Based Multiple Object Tracking
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Institute of Optics and Electronics（光电技术研究所）；Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg（埃尔朗根-纽伦堡弗里德里希-亚历山大大学）
