Abstracts of Salient Objects Detection (just for self-study and memorize)

Salient Objects in Clutter: Bringing Salient Object Detection to the Foreground

ECCV 2018
Abstract:
We provide a comprehensive evaluation of salient object detection (SOD) models. Our analysis identifies a serious degign bias of existing SOG datasets which assumes that each image contains at least one clearly outstanding salient object in low clutter. The design bias has led to a saturated high performance for state-of-the-art SOD models when evaluated on existing datasets. The models, however, still perform far from being satisfacory when applied to real-world daily scenes. Based on our analyses, we first identify 7 crucial aspects that a comprehensive and balanced dataset should fulfill. Then we propose a new high quality dataset and update the previous saliency benchmark. Specifically, our SOC (Salient Objects in Clutter) dataset, includes images with salient and non-salient objects from daily object categories. Beyond object category annotations, each salient image is accompanied by attributes that reflect common challenges in real-world scenes. Finally, we report attribute-based performance assessment on our dataset.
The SOCBenchmark project is available at https://mmcheng.net/SOCBenchmark/.

EGNet: Edge Guidance Network for Salient Object Detection

ICCV 2019
Abstract:
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/.

Weakly-Supervised Salient Object Detection via Scribble Annotations

CVPR 2020
Abstract:
Compared with laborious pixel-wise dense labeling, it is much easier to label data by scribbles, which only costs 1~2 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 will lead to saliency maps of poor boundary localization. To mitigate this problem, we propose an auxiliary edge detection task to localize object edges explicitly, and a gated structure-aware loss to place constraints on the scope of structure to be recovered. Moreover, we design a scribble boosting scheme to iteratively consolidate our scribble annotations, wchich are then employed as supervision to learn high-quality saliency maps. As existing saliency evaluation metrics neglect measure structure alignment of the predictions, the saliency map ranking metric may not comply with human perception. We present a new metric, termed saliency structure measure, to measure the structure alignment of the predicted saliency maps, which is more consistent with human perception. Extensive experiments on six benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method not only outperforms existing weakly-supervised/unsupervised methods, but also is on par with several fully-supervised state-of-the-art models.
The source code is available at https://github.com/JingZhang617/Scribble_Saliency.

UC-Net: Uncertainty Inspired RGB-D Saliency Detection via Conditional Variational Autoencoders

CVPR 2020
Abstract:
In this paper, we propose the first framework (UC-Net) to employ uncertainty for RGB-D saliency detection by learning from the data labeling process. Existing RGB-D saliency detection methods treat the saliency detection task as a point estimation problem, and produce a single saliency map following a deterministic learning pipeline. Inspired by the saliency data labeling process, we propose probabilistic RGB-D saliency detection network via conditional variational autoencoders to model human annotation uncertainty and generate multiple saliency maps for each input image by sampling in the latent space. With the proposed saliency consensus process, we are able to generate an accurate saliency map based on these multiple predictions. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations on six challenging benchmark datasets aganist 18 competing algorithms demonstrate the effectivemess of our approach in learning the distribution of saliency maps, leading to a new state-of-the-art in RGB-D saliency detection.
The source code is available at https://github.com/JingZhang617/UCNet.