Deep Convolutional Neural Networks have been adopted for salient object detection and achieved the state-of-the-art performance. Most of the previous works however focus on region accuracy but not on the boundary quality. In this paper, we propose a predict-refine architecture, BASNet, and a new hybrid loss for Boundary-Aware Salient object detection. Specifically, the architecture is composed of a densely supervised Encoder-Decoder network and a residual refinement module, which are respectively in charge of saliency prediction and saliency map refinement. The hybrid loss guides the network to learn the transformation between the input image and the ground truth in a three-level hierarchy -- pixel-, patch- and map- level -- by fusing Binary Cross Entropy (BCE), Structural SIMilarity (SSIM) and Intersection-over-Union (IoU) losses. Equipped with the hybrid loss, the proposed predict-refine architecture is able to effectively segment the salient object regions and accurately predict the fine structures with clear boundaries. Experimental results on six public datasets show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods both in terms of regional and boundary evaluation measures. Our method runs at over 25 fps on a single GPU. The code is available at: https://github.com/NathanUA/BASNet.

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BASNet: Boundary-Aware Salient Object Detection

Fully convolutional neural networks (FCNs) have shown their advantages in the salient object detection task. However, most existing FCNs-based methods still suffer from coarse object boundaries. In this paper, to solve this problem, we focus on the complementarity between salient edge information and salient object information. Accordingly, we present an edge guidance network (EGNet) for salient object detection with three steps to simultaneously model these two kinds of complementary information in a single network. In the ﬁrst step, we extract the salient object features by a progressive fusion way. In the second step, we integrate the local edge information and global location information to obtain the salient edge features. Finally, to sufﬁciently leverage these complementary features, we couple the same salient edge features with salient object features at various resolutions. Beneﬁting from the rich edge information and location information in salient edge features, the fused features can help locate salient objects, especially their boundaries more accurately. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods on six widely used datasets without any pre-processing and post-processing. The source code is available at http: //mmcheng.net/egnet/.

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EGNet: Edge Guidance Network for Salient Object Detection

We solve the problem of salient object detection by investigating how to expand the role of pooling in convolutional neural networks. Based on the U-shape architecture, we first build a global guidance module (GGM) upon the bottom-up pathway, aiming at providing layers at different feature levels the location information of potential salient objects. We further design a feature aggregation module (FAM) to make the coarse-level semantic information well fused with the fine-level features from the top-down path- way. By adding FAMs after the fusion operations in the top-down pathway, coarse-level features from the GGM can be seamlessly merged with features at various scales. These two pooling-based modules allow the high-level semantic features to be progressively refined, yielding detail enriched saliency maps. Experiment results show that our proposed approach can more accurately locate the salient objects with sharpened details and hence substantially improve the performance compared to the previous state-of-the-arts. Our approach is fast as well and can run at a speed of more than 30 FPS when processing a 300×400 image. Code can be found at http://mmcheng.net/poolnet/.

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A Simple Pooling-Based Design for Real-Time Salient Object Detection

Existing state-of-the-art salient object detection networks rely on aggregating multi-level features of pre-trained convolutional neural networks (CNNs). However, compared to high-level features, low-level features contribute less to performance. Meanwhile, they raise more computational cost because of their larger spatial resolutions. In this paper, we propose a novel Cascaded Partial Decoder (CPD) framework for fast and accurate salient object detection. On the one hand, the framework constructs partial decoder which discards larger resolution features of shallow layers for acceleration. On the other hand, we observe that integrating features of deep layers will obtain relatively precise saliency map. Therefore we directly utilize generated saliency map to recurrently optimize features of deep layers. This strategy efficiently suppresses distractors in the features and significantly improves their representation ability. Experiments conducted on five benchmark datasets exhibit that the proposed model not only achieves state-of-the-art but also runs much faster than existing models. Besides, we apply the proposed framework to optimize existing multi-level feature aggregation models and significantly improve their efficiency and accuracy.

/pdf/cascaded-partial-decoder-for-fast-and-accurate-salient-k452uq5oto.pdf

Cascaded Partial Decoder for Fast and Accurate Salient Object Detection

U2-Net: Going deeper with nested U-structure for salient object detection

Effective integration of contextual information is crucial for salient object detection. To achieve this, most existing methods based on 'skip' architecture mainly focus on how to integrate hierarchical features of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). They simply apply concatenation or element-wise operation to incorporate high-level semantic cues and low-level detailed information. However, this can degrade the quality of predictions because cluttered and noisy information can also be passed through. To address this problem, we proposes a global Recurrent Localization Network (RLN) which exploits contextual information by the weighted response map in order to localize salient objects more accurately. Particularly, a recurrent module is employed to progressively refine the inner structure of the CNN over multiple time steps. Moreover, to effectively recover object boundaries, we propose a local Boundary Refinement Network (BRN) to adaptively learn the local contextual information for each spatial position. The learned propagation coefficients can be used to optimally capture relations between each pixel and its neighbors. Experiments on five challenging datasets show that our approach performs favorably against all existing methods in terms of the popular evaluation metrics.

/pdf/detect-globally-refine-locally-a-novel-approach-to-saliency-vbxntxe6au.pdf

Detect Globally, Refine Locally: A Novel Approach to Saliency Detection

Multi attention module for visual tracking

We propose a novel unsupervised game-theoretic salient object detection algorithm that does not require labeled training data. First, saliency detection problem is formulated as a non-cooperative game, hereinafter referred to as Saliency Game, in which image regions are players who choose to be “background” or “foreground” as their pure strategies. A payoff function is constructed by exploiting multiple cues and combining complementary features. Saliency maps are generated according to each region’s strategy in the Nash equilibrium of the proposed Saliency Game. Second, we explore the complementary relationship between color and deep features and propose an iterative random walk algorithm to combine saliency maps produced by the Saliency Game using different features. Iterative random walk allows sharing information across feature spaces, and detecting objects that are otherwise very hard to detect. Extensive experiments over six challenging data sets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed unsupervised algorithm compared with several state-of-the-art supervised algorithms.

An Unsupervised Game-Theoretic Approach to Saliency Detection

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 nontrivial to thoroughly utilize the multilevel convolutional feature maps and boundary information for salient object detection. In this letter, we propose a novel FCN framework to integrate multilevel convolutional features recurrently with the guidance of object boundary information. First, a deep convolutional network is used to extract multilevel feature maps and separately aggregate them into multiple resolutions, which can be used to generate coarse saliency maps. Meanwhile, another boundary information extraction branch is proposed to generate boundary features. Finally, an attention-based feature fusion module is designed to fuse boundary information into salient regions to achieve accurate boundary inference and semantic enhancement. The final saliency maps are the combination of the predicted boundary maps and integrated saliency maps, which are more closer to the ground truths. Experiments and analysis on four large-scale benchmarks verify that our framework achieves new state-of-the-art results.

Gang Yang

Papers

Detect Globally, Refine Locally: A Novel Approach to Saliency Detection

Multi attention module for visual tracking

An Unsupervised Game-Theoretic Approach to Saliency Detection

Boundary-Guided Feature Aggregation Network for Salient Object Detection

Deep mutual learning for visual object tracking