Abstract This paper investigates the role of saliency to improve the classification accuracy of a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for the case when scarce training data is available. Our approach consists in adding a saliency branch to an existing CNN architecture which is used to modulate the standard bottom-up visual features from the original image input, acting as an attentional mechanism that guides the feature extraction process. The main aim of the proposed approach is to enable the effective training of a fine-grained recognition model with limited training samples and to improve the performance on the task, thereby alleviating the need to annotate a large dataset. The vast majority of saliency methods are evaluated on their ability to generate saliency maps, and not on their functionality in a complete vision pipeline. Our proposed pipeline allows to evaluate saliency methods for the high-level task of object recognition. We perform extensive experiments on various fine-grained datasets (Flowers, Birds, Cars, and Dogs) under different conditions and show that saliency can considerably improve the network’s performance, especially for the case of scarce training data. Furthermore, our experiments show that saliency methods that obtain improved saliency maps (as measured by traditional saliency benchmarks) also translate to saliency methods that yield improved performance gains when applied in an object recognition pipeline.
Recent methods in saliency are mostly based on deep learning networks. Initially, pretrained deep convolutional networks were used directly to extract features for saliency estimation. Afterwards, end-to-end networks that learn a mapping from the input image to the saliency map @cite_42 were introduced. But like most previous work on saliency estimation, the main focus of these works is to estimate a saliency map, not how saliency could contribute in a object recognition pipeline. In this paper, we aim to investigate if saliency can improve the recognition of objects with deep neural networks.
@cite_42
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Recent advances in saliency detection have utilized deep learning to obtain high level features to detect salient regions in a scene. These advances have demonstrated superior results over previous works that utilize hand-crafted low level features for saliency detection. In this paper, we demonstrate that hand-crafted features can provide complementary information to enhance performance of saliency detection that utilizes only high level features. Our method utilizes both high level and low level features for saliency detection under a unified deep learning framework. The high level features are extracted using the VGG-net, and the low level features are compared with other parts of an image to form a low level distance map. The low level distance map is then encoded using a convolutional neural network(CNN) with multiple 1 1 convolutional and ReLU layers. We concatenate the encoded low level distance map and the high level features, and connect them to a fully connected neural network classifier to evaluate the saliency of a query region. Our experiments show that our method can further improve the performance of stateof-the-art deep learning-based saliency detection methods. Recent advances in saliency detection have utilized deep learning to obtain high level features to detect salient regions in a scene. These advances have demonstrated superior results over previous works that utilize hand-crafted low level features for saliency detection. In this paper, we demonstrate that hand-crafted features can provide complementary information to enhance performance of saliency detection that utilizes only high level features. Our method utilizes both high level and low level features for saliency detection under a unified deep learning framework. The high level features are extracted using the VGG-net, and the low level features are compared with other parts of an image to form a low level distance map. The low level distance map is then encoded using a convolutional neural network(CNN) with multiple 1X1 convolutional and ReLU layers. We concatenate the encoded low level distance map and the high level features, and connect them to a fully connected neural network classifier to evaluate the saliency of a query region. Our experiments show that our method can further improve the performance of state-of-the-art deep learning-based saliency detection methods. In recent years, deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have broken all records in salient object detection. However, training such a deep model requires a large amount of manual annotations. Our goal is to overcome this limitation by automatically converting an existing deep contour detection model into a salient object detection model without using any manual salient object masks. For this purpose, we have created a deep network architecture, namely Contour-to-Saliency Network (C2S-Net), by grafting a new branch onto a well-trained contour detection network. Therefore, our C2S-Net has two branches for performing two different tasks: (1) predicting contours with the original contour branch, and (2) estimating per-pixel saliency score of each image with the newly-added saliency branch. To bridge the gap between these two tasks, we further propose a contour-to-saliency transferring method to automatically generate salient object masks which can be used to train the saliency branch from outputs of the contour branch. Finally, we introduce a novel alternating training pipeline to gradually update the network parameters. In this scheme, the contour branch generates saliency masks for training the saliency branch, while the saliency branch, in turn, feeds back saliency knowledge in the form of saliency-aware contour labels, for fine-tuning the contour branch. The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on five well-known benchmarks, outperforming existing fully supervised methods while also maintaining high efficiency. This paper presents a saliency detection algorithm by integrating both local estimation and global search. In the local estimation stage, we detect local saliency by using a deep neural network (DNN-L) which learns local patch features to determine the saliency value of each pixel. The estimated local saliency maps are further refined by exploring the high level object concepts. In the global search stage, the local saliency map together with global contrast and geometric information are used as global features to describe a set of object candidate regions. Another deep neural network (DNN-G) is trained to predict the saliency score of each object region based on the global features. The final saliency map is generated by a weighted sum of salient object regions. Our method presents two interesting insights. First, local features learned by a supervised scheme can effectively capture local contrast, texture and shape information for saliency detection. Second, the complex relationship between different global saliency cues can be captured by deep networks and exploited principally rather than heuristically. Quantitative and qualitative experiments on several benchmark data sets demonstrate that our algorithm performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods.