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-to-environment in a given image. In this paper, we propose a semantic distillation guided SOD (SDG-SOD) method that produces accurate results by fusing semantically distilled knowledge from generated image captioning into the Vision-Transformer-based SOD framework. SDG-SOD can better uncover inter-objects and object-to-environment saliency and cover the gap between the subjective nature of SOD and its expensive labeling. Comprehensive experiments on five benchmark datasets demonstrate that the SDG-SOD outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches on four evaluation metrics, and largely improves the model performance on DUTS, ECSSD, DUT, HKU-IS, and PASCAL-S datasets.
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…
Recent deep learning based salient object detection methods which utilize both saliency and boundary features have achieved remarkable performance. However, most of them ignore the complementarity between saliency features and boundary features, thus get worse predictions in scenes with low contrast between foreground and background. To address this issue, we propose a novel Recurrent Two-Stream Guided Refinement Network (RTGRNet) that consists of iterating Two-Stream Guided Refinement Modules (TGRMs). TGRM consists of a Guide Block and two feature streams: saliency and boundary, the Guide Blo…
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…
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）
We define the task of salient structure (SS) detection to unify the saliency-related tasks like fixation prediction, salient object detection, and other detection of structures of interest. In this study, we propose a unified framework for SS detection by modeling the two-pathway-based guided search strategy of biological vision. Firstly, context-based spatial prior (CBSP) is extracted based on the layout of edges in the given scene along a fast visual pathway, called non-selective pathway. This is a rough and non-selective estimation of the locations where the potential SSs present. Secondly,…
We propose a framework for top-down salient object detection that incorporates a tightly coupled image classification module. The classifier is trained on novel category-aware sparse codes computed on object dictionaries used for saliency modeling. A misclassification indicates that the corresponding saliency model is inaccurate. Hence, the classifier selects images for which the saliency models need to be updated. The category-aware sparse coding produces better image classification accuracy as compared to conventional sparse coding with a reduced computational complexity. A saliency-weighted…
In this paper, we aim to develop an efficient and compact deep network for RGB-D salient object detection, where the depth image provides complementary information to boost performance in complex scenarios. Starting from a coarse initial prediction by a multi-scale residual block, we propose a progressively guided alternate refinement network to refine it. Instead of using ImageNet pre-trained backbone network, we first construct a lightweight depth stream by learning from scratch, which can extract complementary features more efficiently with less redundancy. Then, different from the existing…
Attention mechanisms are widely used in salient object detection models based on deep learning, which can effectively promote the extraction and utilization of useful information by neural networks. However, most of the existing attention modules used in salient object detection are input with the processed feature map itself, which easily leads to the problem of `blind overconfidence'. In this paper, instead of applying the widely used self-attention module, we present an output-guided attention module built with multi-scale outputs to overcome the problem of `blind overconfidence'. We also c…
East China Normal University（东华大学）；New York University（纽约大学）；IHPC & CFAR, Agency for Science, Technology and Research（IHPC与CFAR，科技研究局）；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技术有限公司）
The goal of this work is to present a systematic solution for RGB-D salient object detection, which addresses the following three aspects with a unified framework: modal-specific representation learning, complementary cue selection and cross-modal complement fusion. To learn discriminative modal-specific features, we propose a hierarchical cross-modal distillation scheme, in which the well-learned source modality provides supervisory signals to facilitate the learning process for the new modality. To better extract the complementary cues, we formulate a residual function to incorporate complem…
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 …
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…
Existing studies on salient object detection (SOD) focus on extracting distinct objects with edge information and aggregating multi-level features to improve SOD performance. To achieve satisfactory performance, the methods employ refined edge information and low multi-level discrepancy. However, both performance gain and computational efficiency cannot be attained, which has motivated us to study the inefficiencies in existing encoder-decoder structures to avoid this trade-off. We propose TRACER, which detects salient objects with explicit edges by incorporating attention guided tracing modul…
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…
When Depth Hurts: Reliability-Aware Geometry Distillation for Depth-Free RGB-D Salient Object Detection
University of International Business and Economics（对外经济贸易大学）；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）；China University of Petroleum（中国石油大学）；Southwest Jiaotong University（西南交通大学）；Beijing University Of Technology（北京工业大学）
Recent RGBD-based models for saliency detection have attracted research attention. The depth clues such as boundary clues, surface normal, shape attribute, etc., contribute to the identification of salient objects with complicated scenarios. However, most RGBD networks require multi-modalities from the input side and feed them separately through a two-stream design, which inevitably results in extra costs on depth sensors and computation. To tackle these inconveniences, we present in this paper a novel fusion design named modality-guided subnetwork (MGSnet). It has the following superior desig…
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…
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）
Spectral-Spatial Synergistic Guided Network for Hyperspectral Salient Object Detection
Chongqing Innovation Center, Beijing Institute of Technology（重庆创新中心，北京理工大学）；School of Optics and Photonics, Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学光电学院）；Key Laboratory of Photoelectronic Imaging Technology and System, Ministry of Education of China（中国教育部光电成像技术与系统重点实验室）
Peking University Shenzhen Graduate School（北京大学深圳研究生院）
Fully convolutional neural networks (FCNs) have shown outstanding performance in many computer vision tasks including salient object detection. However, there still remains two issues needed to be addressed in deep learning based saliency detection. One is the lack of tremendous amount of annotated data to train a network. The other is the lack of robustness for extracting salient objects in images containing complex scenes. In this paper, we present a new architecture$ - $PDNet, a robust prior-model guided depth-enhanced network for RGB-D salient object detection. In contrast to existing work…
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）
Texture-guided Saliency Distilling for Unsupervised Salient Object Detection
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）
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
In this paper, we investigate the knowledge distillation (KD) strategy for object detection and propose an effective framework applicable to both homogeneous and heterogeneous student-teacher pairs. The conventional feature imitation paradigm introduces imitation masks to focus on informative foreground areas while excluding the background noises. However, we find that those methods fail to fully utilize the semantic information in all feature pyramid levels, which leads to inefficiency for knowledge distillation between FPN-based detectors. To this end, we propose a novel semantic-guided feat…
Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are good at extracting contexture features within certain receptive fields, while transformers can model the global long-range dependency features. By absorbing the advantage of transformer and the merit of CNN, Swin Transformer shows strong feature representation ability. Based on it, we propose a cross-modality fusion model SwinNet for RGB-D and RGB-T salient object detection. It is driven by Swin Transformer to extract the hierarchical features, boosted by attention mechanism to bridge the gap between two modalities, and guided by edge information to sha…
In this paper, we propose the first self-distillation framework for general object detection, termed LGD (Label-Guided self-Distillation). Previous studies rely on a strong pretrained teacher to provide instructive knowledge that could be unavailable in real-world scenarios. Instead, we generate an instructive knowledge based only on student representations and regular labels. Our framework includes sparse label-appearance encoder, inter-object relation adapter and intra-object knowledge mapper that jointly form an implicit teacher at training phase, dynamically dependent on labels and evolvin…
University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）；Heriot-Watt University（赫瑞-瓦特大学）
Real-world object detection models should be cheap and accurate. Knowledge distillation (KD) can boost the accuracy of a small, cheap detection model by leveraging useful information from a larger teacher model. However, a key challenge is identifying the most informative features produced by the teacher for distillation. In this work, we show that only a very small fraction of features within a ground-truth bounding box are responsible for a teacher's high detection performance. Based on this, we propose Prediction-Guided Distillation (PGD), which focuses distillation on these key predictive …
SemLT3D: Semantic-Guided Expert Distillation for Camera-only Long-Tailed 3D Object Detection
AICV Lab, University of Arkansas, USA（AICV实验室，阿肯色大学，美国）；University of Utah, USA（犹他大学，美国）；University of Houston, USA（休斯顿大学，美国）；University of Liverpool, UK（利物浦大学，英国）
Imperial College London（伦敦帝国学院）；University of Liverpool（利物浦大学）
Salient object detection(SOD) aims at locating the most significant object within a given image. In recent years, great progress has been made in applying SOD on many vision tasks. The depth map could provide additional spatial prior and boundary cues to boost the performance. Combining the depth information with image data obtained from standard visual cameras has been widely used in recent SOD works, however, introducing depth information in a suboptimal fusion strategy may have negative influence in the performance of SOD. In this paper, we discuss about the advantages of the so-called prog…
Scaling Video-Language Models to 10K Frames via Hierarchical Differential Distillation
Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence, Renmin University of China（中国人民大学北京校区人工智能学院）；School of Artificial Intelligence, Wuhan University（武汉大学人工智能学院）
Most existing salient object detection (SOD) models are difficult to apply due to the complex and huge model structures. Although some lightweight models are proposed, the accuracy is barely satisfactory. In this paper, we design a novel semantics-guided contextual fusion network (SCFNet) that focuses on the interactive fusion of multi-level features for accurate and efficient salient object detection. Furthermore, we apply knowledge distillation to SOD task and provide a sizeable dataset KD-SOD80K. In detail, we transfer the rich knowledge from a seasoned teacher to the untrained SCFNet throu…
Department of Information Engineering Hong Kong；Department of Information Engineering
Since the wide employment of deep learning frameworks in video salient object detection, the accuracy of the recent approaches has made stunning progress. These approaches mainly adopt the sequential modules, based on optical flow or recurrent neural network (RNN), to learn robust spatiotemporal features. These modules are effective but significantly increase the computational burden of the corresponding deep models. In this paper, to simplify the network and maintain the accuracy, we present a lightweight network tailored for video salient object detection through the spatiotemporal knowledge…
RGB-D salient object detection (SOD) demonstrates its superiority on detecting in complex environments due to the additional depth information introduced in the data. Inevitably, an independent stream is introduced to extract features from depth images, leading to extra computation and parameters. This methodology sacrifices the model size to improve the detection accuracy which may impede the practical application of SOD problems. To tackle this dilemma, we propose a dynamic distillation method along with a lightweight structure, which significantly reduces the computational burden while main…
School of Computer Science, Wuhan University（武汉大学计算机学院）；School of Computer Science, The University of Sydney（悉尼大学计算机学院）；School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学计算机科学与工程学院）
S$^2$Q-VDiT: Accurate Quantized Video Diffusion Transformer with Salient Data and Sparse Token Distillation
State Key Laboratory of AI Safety, Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（人工智能安全国家重点实验室，计算技术研究所，中国科学院）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；ETH Zürich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）
Video classification is productive in many practical applications, and the recent deep learning has greatly improved its accuracy. However, existing works often model video frames indiscriminately, but from the view of motion, video frames can be decomposed into salient and non-salient areas naturally. Salient and non-salient areas should be modeled with different networks, for the former present both appearance and motion information, and the latter present static background information. To address this problem, in this paper, video saliency is predicted by optical flow without supervision fi…
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…
Semantically Informed Salient Regions Guided Radiology Report Generation
School of Artificial Intelligence, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（人工智能学院，北京邮电大学）；Department of Radiology, Peking University Third Hospital（北京大学第三医院放射科）
We propose a new saliency-guided method for generating supervoxels in 3D space. Rather than using an evenly distributed spatial seeding procedure, our method uses visual saliency to guide the process of supervoxel generation. This results in densely distributed, small, and precise supervoxels in salient regions which often contain objects, and larger supervoxels in less salient regions that often correspond to background. Our approach largely improves the quality of the resulting supervoxel segmentation in terms of boundary recall and under-segmentation error on publicly available benchmarks.
Deep learning models have demonstrated remarkable success in object detection, yet their complexity and computational intensity pose a barrier to deploying them in real-world applications (e.g., self-driving perception). Knowledge Distillation (KD) is an effective way to derive efficient models. However, only a small number of KD methods tackle object detection. Also, most of them focus on mimicking the plain features of the teacher model but rarely consider how the features contribute to the final detection. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for knowledge distillation in object detec…
