Given a group of images, co-salient object detection (CoSOD) aims to highlight the common salient object in each image. There are two factors closely related to the success of this task, namely consensus extraction, and the dispersion of consensus to each image. Most previous works represent the group consensus using local features, while we instead utilize a hierarchical Transformer module for extracting semantic-level consensus. Therefore, it can obtain a more comprehensive representation of the common object category, and exclude interference from other objects that share local similarities with the target object. In addition, we propose a Transformer-based dispersion module that takes into account the variation of the co-salient object in different scenes. It distributes the consensus to the image feature maps in an image-specific way while making full use of interactions within the group. These two modules are integrated with a ViT encoder and an FPN-like decoder to form an end-to-end trainable network, without additional branch and auxiliary loss. The proposed method is evaluated on three commonly used CoSOD datasets and achieves state-of-the-art performance.
Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics（南京航空航天大学）；ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence（启元实验室）；Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）
Co-Salient Object Detection (CoSOD) aims at detecting common salient objects within a group of relevant source images. Most of the latest works employ the attention mechanism for finding common objects. To achieve accurate CoSOD results with high-quality maps and high efficiency, we propose a novel Memory-aided Contrastive Consensus Learning (MCCL) framework, which is capable of effectively detecting co-salient objects in real time (~150 fps). To learn better group consensus, we propose the Group Consensus Aggregation Module (GCAM) to abstract the common features of each image group; meanwhile…
HKUST（香港科技大学）；Inception Institute of AI (IIAI)（起源人工智能研究院）；Kwai Inc.（快手公司）
We present a novel group collaborative learning framework (GCoNet) capable of detecting co-salient objects in real time (16ms), by simultaneously mining consensus representations at group level based on the two necessary criteria: 1) intra-group compactness to better formulate the consistency among co-salient objects by capturing their inherent shared attributes using our novel group affinity module; 2) inter-group separability to effectively suppress the influence of noisy objects on the output by introducing our new group collaborating module conditioning the inconsistent consensus. To learn…
Benefiting from color independence, illumination invariance and location discrimination attributed by the depth map, it can provide important supplemental information for extracting salient objects in complex environments. However, high-quality depth sensors are expensive and can not be widely applied. While general depth sensors produce the noisy and sparse depth information, which brings the depth-based networks with irreversible interference. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-task and multi-modal filtered transformer (MMFT) network for RGB-D salient object detection (SOD). Specificall…
Iran University of Science and Technology（伊朗科技大学）；Imagia Inc.（Imagia公司）
Despite the powerful feature extraction capability of Convolutional Neural Networks, there are still some challenges in saliency detection. In this paper, we focus on two aspects of challenges: i) Since salient objects appear in various sizes, using single-scale convolution would not capture the right size. Moreover, using multi-scale convolutions without considering their importance may confuse the model. ii) Employing multi-level features helps the model use both local and global context. However, treating all features equally results in information redundancy. Therefore, there needs to be a…
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 more dramatic multi-scale variations and more complicated foregrounds and backgrounds in optical remote sensing images (RSIs), the salient object detection (SOD) for optical RSIs becomes a huge challenge. However, different from natural scene images (NSIs), the discussion on the optical RSI SOD task still remains scarce. In this paper, we propose a multi-scale context network, namely MSCNet, for SOD in optical RSIs. Specifically, a multi-scale context extraction module is adopted to address the scale variation of salient objects by effectively learning multi-scale contextual informa…
In this paper, our goal is salient building outline enhancement and extraction from images taken from consumer cameras using L0 smoothing. We address weak outlines and over-smoothing problem. Weak outlines are often undetected by edge extractors or easily smoothed out. We propose an iterative method, including the smoothing cell and sharpening cell. In the smoothing cell, we iteratively enlarge the smoothing level of the L0 smoothing. In the sharpening cell, we use Hough Transform to extract lines, based on the assumption that salient outlines for buildings are usually straight, and enhance th…
GCoNet+: A Stronger Group Collaborative Co-Salient Object Detector
Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics（南京航空航天大学）；Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）；Aalto University（阿尔托大学）；ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；Kuaishou Technology（快手科技）；KU Leuven（鲁汶大学）
Salient object detection is a fundamental problem and has been received a great deal of attentions in computer vision. Recently deep learning model became a powerful tool for image feature extraction. In this paper, we propose a multi-scale deep neural network (MSDNN) for salient object detection. The proposed model first extracts global high-level features and context information over the whole source image with recurrent convolutional neural network (RCNN). Then several stacked deconvolutional layers are adopted to get the multi-scale feature representation and obtain a series of saliency ma…
AI Technology Lab, OPEN8 Singapore（AI技术实验室，OPEN8新加坡）
Contour information plays a vital role in salient object detection. However, excessive false positives remain in predictions from existing contour-based models due to insufficient contour-saliency fusion. In this work, we designed a network for better edge quality in salient object detection. We proposed a contour-saliency blending module to exchange information between contour and saliency. We adopted recursive CNN to increase contour-saliency fusion while keeping the total trainable parameters the same. Furthermore, we designed a stage-wise feature extraction module to help the model pick up…
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…
Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics（南京航空航天大学）；University of Leicester（莱斯特大学）
Deep-learning based salient object detection methods achieve great improvements. However, there are still problems existing in the predictions, such as blurry boundary and inaccurate location, which is mainly caused by inadequate feature extraction and integration. In this paper, we propose a Multi-scale Edge-based U-shape Network (MEUN) to integrate various features at different scales to achieve better performance. To extract more useful information for boundary prediction, U-shape Edge Network modules are embedded in each decoder units. Besides, the additional down-sampling module alleviate…
Deep learning solutions of the salient object detection problem have achieved great results in recent years. The majority of these models are based on encoders and decoders, with a different multi-feature combination. In this paper, we show that feature concatenation works better than other combination methods like multiplication or addition. Also, joint feature learning gives better results, because of the information sharing during their processing. We designed a Complementary Extraction Module (CEM) to extract necessary features with edge preservation. Our proposed Excessiveness Loss (EL) f…
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,…
Iran University of Science and Technology（伊朗科技大学）；Imagia Inc.（Imagia公司）
Beneficial from Fully Convolutional Neural Networks (FCNs), saliency detection methods have achieved promising results. However, it is still challenging to learn effective features for detecting salient objects in complicated scenarios, in which i) non-salient regions may have "salient-like" appearance; ii) the salient objects may have different-looking regions. To handle these complex scenarios, we propose a Feature Guide Network which exploits the nature of low-level and high-level features to i) make foreground and background regions more distinct and suppress the non-salient regions which …
It is believed that human vision system (HVS) consists of pre-attentive process and attention process when performing salient object detection (SOD). Based on this fact, we propose a four-stage framework for SOD, in which the first two stages match the \textbf{P}re-\textbf{A}ttentive process consisting of general feature extraction (GFE) and feature preprocessing (FP), and the last two stages are corresponding to \textbf{A}ttention process containing saliency feature extraction (SFE) and the feature aggregation (FA), namely \textbf{PAANet}. According to the pre-attentive process, the GFE stage…
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…
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 …
In the current salient object detection network, the most popular method is using U-shape structure. However, the massive number of parameters leads to more consumption of computing and storage resources which are not feasible to deploy on the limited memory device. Some others shallow layer network will not maintain the same accuracy compared with U-shape structure and the deep network structure with more parameters will not converge to a global minimum loss with great speed. To overcome all of these disadvantages, we proposed a new deep convolution network architecture with three contributio…
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…
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…
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)…
Recent progress on salient object detection mainly aims at exploiting how to effectively integrate convolutional side-output features in convolutional neural networks (CNN). Based on this, most of the existing state-of-the-art saliency detectors design complex network structures to fuse the side-output features of the backbone feature extraction networks. However, should the fusion strategies be more and more complex for accurate salient object detection? In this paper, we observe that the contexts of a natural image can be well expressed by a high-to-low self-learning of side-output convoluti…
The High-Resolution Transformer (HRFormer) can maintain high-resolution representation and share global receptive fields. It is friendly towards salient object detection (SOD) in which the input and output have the same resolution. However, two critical problems need to be solved for two-modality SOD. One problem is two-modality fusion. The other problem is the HRFormer output's fusion. To address the first problem, a supplementary modality is injected into the primary modality by using global optimization and an attention mechanism to select and purify the modality at the input level. To solv…
Quality-aware Selective Fusion Network for V-D-T Salient Object Detection
School of Automation, Hangzhou Dianzi University（杭州电子科技大学自动化学院）；School of Software, Shandong University（山东大学软件学院）；Lishui Institute of Hangzhou Dianzi University（杭州电子科技大学丽水研究院）；School of Communication Engineering, Hangzhou Dianzi University（杭州电子科技大学通信工程学院）；Hangzhou Innovation Institute, Beihang University（北京航空航天大学杭州创新研究院）
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）
Assisted Refinement Network Based on Channel Information Interaction for Camouflaged and Salient Object Detection
Department of Physics, J.K. Institute of Science（物理系，J.K.科学研究院）；World Scientific University（世界科学大学）；University of Intelligent Studies（智能研究大学）；School of Computer Science and Technology, Xinjiang University（计算机科学与技术学院，新疆大学）；Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University（电子工程系，清华大学）
School of Artificial Intelligence, Xidian University（西安电子科技大学人工智能学院）；School of Mechano-Electronic Engineering, Xidian University（西安电子科技大学机电工程学院）；Aberystwyth University（阿伯里斯特威斯大学）；School of Automation, Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学自动化学院）
With the goal of identifying pixel-wise salient object regions from each input image, salient object detection (SOD) has been receiving great attention in recent years. One kind of mainstream SOD methods is formed by a bottom-up feature encoding procedure and a top-down information decoding procedure. While numerous approaches have explored the bottom-up feature extraction for this task, the design on top-down flows still remains under-studied. To this end, this paper revisits the role of top-down modeling in salient object detection and designs a novel densely nested top-down flows (DNTDF)-ba…
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…
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 …
Point-aware Interaction and CNN-induced Refinement Network for RGB-D Salient Object Detection
Beijing Jiaotong University（北京交通大学）；Shandong University（山东大学）；Institute of Information Science, Beijing Jiaotong University（北京交通大学信息科学研究所）；Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）；City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）
Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；DAMO Academy, Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团达摩院）
Existing RGB-D salient object detection (SOD) approaches concentrate on the cross-modal fusion between the RGB stream and the depth stream. They do not deeply explore the effect of the depth map itself. In this work, we design a single stream network to directly use the depth map to guide early fusion and middle fusion between RGB and depth, which saves the feature encoder of the depth stream and achieves a lightweight and real-time model. We tactfully utilize depth information from two perspectives: (1) Overcoming the incompatibility problem caused by the great difference between modalities, …
Shanghai Institute for Advanced Communication and Data Science（上海先进通信与数据科学研究院）；Shanghai University（上海大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Stony Brook University（石溪大学）
Salient object detection in optical remote sensing images (ORSI-SOD) has been widely explored for understanding ORSIs. However, previous methods focus mainly on improving the detection accuracy while neglecting the cost in memory and computation, which may hinder their real-world applications. In this paper, we propose a novel lightweight ORSI-SOD solution, named CorrNet, to address these issues. In CorrNet, we first lighten the backbone (VGG-16) and build a lightweight subnet for feature extraction. Then, following the coarse-to-fine strategy, we generate an initial coarse saliency map from h…
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…
Nankai University（南开大学）；Tianjin University of Finance and Economics（天津财经大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
Salient object detection (SOD) focuses on distinguishing the most conspicuous objects in the scene. However, most related works are based on RGB images, which lose massive useful information. Accordingly, with the maturity of thermal technology, RGB-T (RGB-Thermal) multi-modality tasks attain more and more attention. Thermal infrared images carry important information which can be used to improve the accuracy of SOD prediction. To accomplish it, the methods to integrate multi-modal information and suppress noises are critical. In this paper, we propose a novel network called Interactive Contex…
Local feature matching is essential for many applications, such as localization and 3D reconstruction. However, it is challenging to match feature points accurately in various camera viewpoints and illumination conditions. In this paper, we propose a framework that robustly extracts and describes salient local features regardless of changing light and viewpoints. The framework suppresses illumination variations and encourages structural information to ignore the noise from light and to focus on edges. We classify the elements in the feature covariance matrix, an implicit feature map informatio…
STENet: Superpixel Token Enhancing Network for RGB-D Salient Object Detection
School of Communication and Information Engineering, Shanghai University（上海大学通信与信息工程学院）；Yunnan Key Laboratory of Service Computing, Yunnan University of Finance and Economics（云南财经大学服务计算重点实验室）；Innovation Academy for Microsatellites of Chinese Academy of Science（中国科学院微卫星创新院）；Institute for Urban Governance, Shanghai University（上海大学城市治理研究院）
Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；Jiangxi University of Finance and Economics（江西财经大学）；Stony Brook University（石溪大学）；Qingdao University（青岛大学）
Existing RGB-D salient object detection methods treat depth information as an independent component to complement its RGB part, and widely follow the bi-stream parallel network architecture. To selectively fuse the CNNs features extracted from both RGB and depth as a final result, the state-of-the-art (SOTA) bi-stream networks usually consist of two independent subbranches; i.e., one subbranch is used for RGB saliency and the other aims for depth saliency. However, its depth saliency is persistently inferior to the RGB saliency because the RGB component is intrinsically more informative than t…
Nankai University（南开大学）；University of Central Florida（中佛罗里达大学）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）
In this paper, we aim at solving pixel-wise binary problems, including salient object segmentation, skeleton extraction, and edge detection, by introducing a unified architecture. Previous works have proposed tailored methods for solving each of the three tasks independently. Here, we show that these tasks share some similarities that can be exploited for developing a unified framework. In particular, we introduce a horizontal cascade, each component of which is densely connected to the outputs of previous component. Stringing these components together allows us to effectively exploit features…
National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST)（国立先进工业科学技术研究所（AIST））；Simon Fraser University（西蒙弗雷泽大学）
This paper proposes a novel heterogeneous grid convolution that builds a graph-based image representation by exploiting heterogeneity in the image content, enabling adaptive, efficient, and controllable computations in a convolutional architecture. More concretely, the approach builds a data-adaptive graph structure from a convolutional layer by a differentiable clustering method, pools features to the graph, performs a novel direction-aware graph convolution, and unpool features back to the convolutional layer. By using the developed module, the paper proposes heterogeneous grid convolutional…
Co-saliency detection (Co-SOD) aims to segment the common salient foreground in a group of relevant images. In this paper, inspired by human behavior, we propose a gradient-induced co-saliency detection (GICD) method. We first abstract a consensus representation for the grouped images in the embedding space; then, by comparing the single image with consensus representation, we utilize the feedback gradient information to induce more attention to the discriminative co-salient features. In addition, due to the lack of Co-SOD training data, we design a jigsaw training strategy, with which Co-SOD …
Saliency map detection, as a method for detecting important regions of an image, is used in many applications such as image classification and recognition. We propose that context detection could have an essential role in image saliency detection. This requires extraction of high level features. In this paper a saliency map is proposed, based on image context detection using semantic segmentation as a high level feature. Saliency map from semantic information is fused with color and contrast based saliency maps. The final saliency map is then generated. Simulation results for Pascal-voc11 imag…
Adversarial Attacks Assessment of Salient Object Detection via Symbolic Learning
CICESE Research Center（CICESE研究中心）；Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education（蒙特雷理工学院）；Anáhuac University（阿纳瓦克大学）；National Institute of Technology Rourkela（国家理工学院鲁尔克拉分校）；Terra-Peninsular；Cornell Lab of Ornithology（康奈尔鸟类学实验室）；Universidad Autónoma de San Luis Potosí（圣路易斯波托西自治大学）
Extracting accurate foreground objects from a scene is an essential step for many video applications. Traditional background subtraction algorithms can generate coarse estimates, but generating high quality masks requires professional softwares with significant human interventions, e.g., providing trimaps or labeling key frames. We propose an automatic foreground extraction method in applications where a static but imperfect background is available. Examples include filming and surveillance where the background can be captured before the objects enter the scene or after they leave the scene. O…
Automatic video segmentation plays an important role in a wide range of computer vision and image processing applications. Recently, various methods have been proposed for this purpose. The problem is that most of these methods are far from real-time processing even for low-resolution videos due to the complex procedures. To this end, we propose a new and quite fast method for automatic video segmentation with the help of 1) efficient optimization of Markov random fields with polynomial time of number of pixels by introducing graph cuts, 2) automatic, computationally efficient but stable deriv…
