Salient object detection segments attractive objects in scenes. RGB and thermal modalities provide complementary information and scribble annotations alleviate large amounts of human labor. Based on the above facts, we propose a scribble-supervised RGB-T salient object detection model. By a four-step solution (expansion, prediction, aggregation, and supervision), label-sparse challenge of scribble-supervised method is solved. To expand scribble annotations, we collect the superpixels that foreground scribbles pass through in RGB and thermal images, respectively. The expanded multi-modal labels provide the coarse object boundary. To further polish the expanded labels, we propose a prediction module to alleviate the sharpness of boundary. To play the complementary roles of two modalities, we combine the two into aggregated pseudo labels. Supervised by scribble annotations and pseudo labels, our model achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the relabeled RGBT-S dataset. Furthermore, the model is applied to RGB-D and video scribble-supervised applications, achieving consistently excellent performance.
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 …
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…
Weakly-Supervised RGB-D Salient Object Detection via SAM-driven Pseudo Annotation and State Space Interaction-based Diffusion
School of Communication and Information Engineering, Shanghai University（上海大学通信与信息工程学院）；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）
Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；Data61-CSIRO
Recently, deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have demonstrated strong performance on RGB salient object detection. Although, depth information can help improve detection results, the exploration of CNNs for RGB-D salient object detection remains limited. Here we propose a novel deep CNN architecture for RGB-D salient object detection that exploits high-level, mid-level, and low level features. Further, we present novel depth features that capture the ideas of background enclosure and depth contrast that are suitable for a learned approach. We show improved results compared to state-of-th…
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 …
School of Advanced Technology, Xi’an Jiaotong Liverpool University（西交利物浦大学先进技术学院）
Sparse labels have been attracting much attention in recent years. However, the performance gap between weakly supervised and fully supervised salient object detection methods is huge, and most previous weakly supervised works adopt complex training methods with many bells and whistles. In this work, we propose a one-round end-to-end training approach for weakly supervised salient object detection via scribble annotations without pre/post-processing operations or extra supervision data. Since scribble labels fail to offer detailed salient regions, we propose a local coherence loss to propagate…
China University of Petroleum, Beijing Campus (CUP)（中国石油大学（北京））
The extensive research leveraging RGB-D information has been exploited in salient object detection. However, salient visual cues appear in various scales and resolutions of RGB images due to semantic gaps at different feature levels. Meanwhile, similar salient patterns are available in cross-modal depth images as well as multi-scale versions. Cross-modal fusion and multi-scale refinement are still an open problem in RGB-D salient object detection task. In this paper, we begin by introducing top-down and bottom-up iterative refinement architecture to leverage multi-scale features, and then devi…
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…
RGB-D salient object detection (SOD) has been in the spotlight recently because it is an important preprocessing operation for various vision tasks. However, despite advances in deep learning-based methods, RGB-D SOD is still challenging due to the large domain gap between an RGB image and the depth map and low-quality depth maps. To solve this problem, we propose a novel superpixel prototype sampling network (SPSN) architecture. The proposed model splits the input RGB image and depth map into component superpixels to generate component prototypes. We design a prototype sampling network so tha…
Conventional RGB-D salient object detection methods aim to leverage depth as complementary information to find the salient regions in both modalities. However, the salient object detection results heavily rely on the quality of captured depth data which sometimes are unavailable. In this work, we make the first attempt to solve the RGB-D salient object detection problem with a novel depth-awareness framework. This framework only relies on RGB data in the testing phase, utilizing captured depth data as supervision for representation learning. To construct our framework as well as achieving accu…
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…
Salient object detection (SOD) is a crucial and preliminary task for many computer vision applications, which have made progress with deep CNNs. Most of the existing methods mainly rely on the RGB information to distinguish the salient objects, which faces difficulties in some complex scenarios. To solve this, many recent RGBD-based networks are proposed by adopting the depth map as an independent input and fuse the features with RGB information. Taking the advantages of RGB and RGBD methods, we propose a novel depth-aware salient object detection framework, which has following superior design…
Shanghai University（上海大学）；University of Manitoba（曼尼托巴大学）；Huawei Technologies Canada（华为技术加拿大公司）；Stony Brook University（石溪大学）
Depth maps contain geometric clues for assisting Salient Object Detection (SOD). In this paper, we propose a novel Cross-Modal Weighting (CMW) strategy to encourage comprehensive interactions between RGB and depth channels for RGB-D SOD. Specifically, three RGB-depth interaction modules, named CMW-L, CMW-M and CMW-H, are developed to deal with respectively low-, middle- and high-level cross-modal information fusion. These modules use Depth-to-RGB Weighing (DW) and RGB-to-RGB Weighting (RW) to allow rich cross-modal and cross-scale interactions among feature layers generated by different networ…
Salient object detection is a fundamental topic in computer vision. Previous methods based on RGB-D often suffer from the incompatibility of multi-modal feature fusion and the insufficiency of multi-scale feature aggregation. To tackle these two dilemmas, we propose a novel multi-modal and multi-scale refined network (M2RNet). Three essential components are presented in this network. The nested dual attention module (NDAM) explicitly exploits the combined features of RGB and depth flows. The adjacent interactive aggregation module (AIAM) gradually integrates the neighbor features of high, midd…
College of Information Science & Electronic Engineering, Zhejiang University（浙江大学信息科学与电子工程学院）
RGB-D salient object detection aims to identify the most visually distinctive objects in a pair of color and depth images. Based upon an observation that most of the salient objects may stand out at least in one modality, this paper proposes an adaptive fusion scheme to fuse saliency predictions generated from two modalities. Specifically, we design a two-streamed convolutional neural network (CNN), each of which extracts features and predicts a saliency map from either RGB or depth modality. Then, a saliency fusion module learns a switch map that is used to adaptively fuse the predicted salie…
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…
Center for Robotics, School of Automation Engineering, UESTC（电子科技大学自动化工程学院机器人研究中心）；Group 42 (G42)（42集团（G42））；University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）；University at Albany, State University of New York（纽约州立大学奥尔巴尼分校）
In this paper, we study the problem of salient object detection (SOD) for RGB-D images using both color and depth information.A major technical challenge in performing salient object detection fromRGB-D images is how to fully leverage the two complementary data sources. Current works either simply distill prior knowledge from the corresponding depth map for handling the RGB-image or blindly fuse color and geometric information to generate the coarse depth-aware representations, hindering the performance of RGB-D saliency detectors.In this work, we introduceCascade Graph Neural Networks(Cas-Gnn…
Depth information has been proved beneficial in RGB-D salient object detection (SOD). However, depth maps obtained often suffer from low quality and inaccuracy. Most existing RGB-D SOD models have no cross-modal interactions or only have unidirectional interactions from depth to RGB in their encoder stages, which may lead to inaccurate encoder features when facing low quality depth. To address this limitation, we propose to conduct progressive bi-directional interactions as early in the encoder stage, yielding a novel bi-directional transfer-and-selection network named BTS-Net, which adopts a …
RGB-thermal salient object detection (SOD) aims to segment the common prominent regions of visible image and corresponding thermal infrared image that we call it RGBT SOD. Existing methods don't fully explore and exploit the potentials of complementarity of different modalities and multi-type cues of image contents, which play a vital role in achieving accurate results. In this paper, we propose a multi-interactive dual-decoder to mine and model the multi-type interactions for accurate RGBT SOD. In specific, we first encode two modalities into multi-level multi-modal feature representations. T…
Nankai University（南开大学）；University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）
The high computational cost of neural networks has prevented recent successes in RGB-D salient object detection (SOD) from benefiting real-world applications. Hence, this paper introduces a novel network, MobileSal, which focuses on efficient RGB-D SOD using mobile networks for deep feature extraction. However, mobile networks are less powerful in feature representation than cumbersome networks. To this end, we observe that the depth information of color images can strengthen the feature representation related to SOD if leveraged properly. Therefore, we propose an implicit depth restoration (I…
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）
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）
RGB-thermal salient object detection (RGB-T SOD) aims to locate the common prominent objects of an aligned visible and thermal infrared image pair and accurately segment all the pixels belonging to those objects. It is promising in challenging scenes such as nighttime and complex backgrounds due to the insensitivity to lighting conditions of thermal images. Thus, the key problem of RGB-T SOD is to make the features from the two modalities complement and adjust each other flexibly, since it is inevitable that any modalities of RGB-T image pairs failure due to challenging scenes such as extreme …
Salient object detection is the pixel-level dense prediction task which can highlight the prominent object in the scene. Recently U-Net framework is widely used, and continuous convolution and pooling operations generate multi-level features which are complementary with each other. In view of the more contribution of high-level features for the performance, we propose a triplet transformer embedding module to enhance them by learning long-range dependencies across layers. It is the first to use three transformer encoders with shared weights to enhance multi-level features. By further designing…
National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology（产业技术综合研究所）；Jiangxi University of Finance and Economics（江西财经大学）；The University of Electro-Communications（电气通信大学）
Bottom-up and top-down visual cues are two types of information that helps the visual saliency models. These salient cues can be from spatial distributions of the features (space-based saliency) or contextual / task-dependent features (object based saliency). Saliency models generally incorporate salient cues either in bottom-up or top-down norm separately. In this work, we combine bottom-up and top-down cues from both space and object based salient features on RGB-D data. In addition, we also investigated the ability of various pre-trained convolutional neural networks for extracting top-down…
Beijing Jiaotong University（北京交通大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）
Focusing on the issue of how to effectively capture and utilize cross-modality information in RGB-D salient object detection (SOD) task, we present a convolutional neural network (CNN) model, named CIR-Net, based on the novel cross-modality interaction and refinement. For the cross-modality interaction, 1) a progressive attention guided integration unit is proposed to sufficiently integrate RGB-D feature representations in the encoder stage, and 2) a convergence aggregation structure is proposed, which flows the RGB and depth decoding features into the corresponding RGB-D decoding streams via …
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…
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…
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）
Sichuan University（四川大学）；Nankai University（南开大学）；Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence（起源人工智能研究院）；Wuhan University（武汉大学）
This paper proposes a novel joint learning and densely-cooperative fusion (JL-DCF) architecture for RGB-D salient object detection. Existing models usually treat RGB and depth as independent information and design separate networks for feature extraction from each. Such schemes can easily be constrained by a limited amount of training data or over-reliance on an elaborately-designed training process. In contrast, our JL-DCF learns from both RGB and depth inputs through a Siamese network. To this end, we propose two effective components: joint learning (JL), and densely-cooperative fusion (DCF)…
RDVSv2: A Large-scale Benchmark for RGB-D Video Salient Object Detection
National Key Laboratory of Fundamental Science on Synthetic Vision, Sichuan University（四川大学合成视觉基础科学国家重点实验室）；College of Computer Science, Sichuan University（四川大学计算机学院）
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…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Sichuan University（四川大学）
RGB-D salient object detection (SOD) recently has attracted increasing research interest and many deep learning methods based on encoder-decoder architectures have emerged. However, most existing RGB-D SOD models conduct feature fusion either in the single encoder or the decoder stage, which hardly guarantees sufficient cross-modal fusion ability. In this paper, we make the first attempt in addressing RGB-D SOD through 3D convolutional neural networks. The proposed model, named RD3D, aims at pre-fusion in the encoder stage and in-depth fusion in the decoder stage to effectively promote the ful…
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）
Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）
The main purpose of RGB-D salient object detection (SOD) is how to better integrate and utilize cross-modal fusion information. In this paper, we explore these issues from a new perspective. We integrate the features of different modalities through densely connected structures and use their mixed features to generate dynamic filters with receptive fields of different sizes. In the end, we implement a kind of more flexible and efficient multi-scale cross-modal feature processing, i.e. dynamic dilated pyramid module. In order to make the predictions have sharper edges and consistent saliency reg…
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…
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…
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…
Salient Object Detection is the task of predicting the human attended region in a given scene. Fusing depth information has been proven effective in this task. The main challenge of this problem is how to aggregate the complementary information from RGB modality and depth modality. However, conventional deep models heavily rely on CNN feature extractors, and the long-range contextual dependencies are usually ignored. In this work, we propose Dual Swin-Transformer based Mutual Interactive Network. We adopt Swin-Transformer as the feature extractor for both RGB and depth modality to model the lo…
Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Beijing Jiaotong University（北京交通大学）；Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学）；Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院）
We present an effective method to progressively integrate and refine the cross-modality complementarities for RGB-D salient object detection (SOD). The proposed network mainly solves two challenging issues: 1) how to effectively integrate the complementary information from RGB image and its corresponding depth map, and 2) how to adaptively select more saliency-related features. First, we propose a cross-modality feature modulation (cmFM) module to enhance feature representations by taking the depth features as prior, which models the complementary relations of RGB-D data. Second, we propose an…
Sichuan University（四川大学）；National Key Laboratory of Fundamental Science on Synthetic Vision, Sichuan University（四川大学视觉合成图形图像技术国家级重点实验室）；Nankai University（南开大学）；Wuhan University（武汉大学）；Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence (IIAI)（起源人工智能研究院）；University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）
Existing RGB-D salient object detection (SOD) models usually treat RGB and depth as independent information and design separate networks for feature extraction from each. Such schemes can easily be constrained by a limited amount of training data or over-reliance on an elaborately designed training process. Inspired by the observation that RGB and depth modalities actually present certain commonality in distinguishing salient objects, a novel joint learning and densely cooperative fusion (JL-DCF) architecture is designed to learn from both RGB and depth inputs through a shared network backbone…
City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）；Shenyang Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院沈阳自动化研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Numerous efforts have been made to design different low level saliency cues for the RGBD saliency detection, such as color or depth contrast features, background and color compactness priors. However, how these saliency cues interact with each other and how to incorporate these low level saliency cues effectively to generate a master saliency map remain a challenging problem. In this paper, we design a new convolutional neural network (CNN) to fuse different low level saliency cues into hierarchical features for automatically detecting salient objects in RGBD images. In contrast to the existin…
School of Computer Science, Southeast University（东南大学计算机科学与工程学院）
Most of existing RGB-D salient object detection (SOD) methods follow the CNN-based paradigm, which is unable to model long-range dependencies across space and modalities due to the natural locality of CNNs. Here we propose the Hierarchical Cross-modal Transformer (HCT), a new multi-modal transformer, to tackle this problem. Unlike previous multi-modal transformers that directly connecting all patches from two modalities, we explore the cross-modal complementarity hierarchically to respect the modality gap and spatial discrepancy in unaligned regions. Specifically, we propose to use intra-modal…
The reasonable employment of RGB and depth data show great significance in promoting the development of computer vision tasks and robot-environment interaction. However, there are different advantages and disadvantages in the early and late fusion of the two types of data. Besides, due to the diversity of object information, using a single type of data in a specific scenario tends to result in semantic misleading. Based on the above considerations, we propose an adaptively-cooperative fusion network (ACFNet) with ResinRes structure for salient object detection. This structure is designed to fl…
Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学）；Pengcheng Lab（鹏城实验室）
Benefiting from the spatial cues embedded in depth images, recent progress on RGB-D saliency detection shows impressive ability on some challenge scenarios. However, there are still two limitations. One hand is that the pooling and upsampling operations in FCNs might cause blur object boundaries. On the other hand, using an additional depth-network to extract depth features might lead to high computation and storage cost. The reliance on depth inputs during testing also limits the practical applications of current RGB-D models. In this paper, we propose a novel collaborative learning framework…
In this work, we propose to utilize Convolutional Neural Networks to boost the performance of depth-induced salient object detection by capturing the high-level representative features for depth modality. We formulate the depth-induced saliency detection as a CNN-based cross-modal transfer problem to bridge the gap between the "data-hungry" nature of CNNs and the unavailability of sufficient labeled training data in depth modality. In the proposed approach, we leverage the auxiliary data from the source modality effectively by training the RGB saliency detection network to obtain the task-spec…
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…
