Recent Salient Object Detection (SOD) systems are mostly based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). Specifically, Deeply Supervised Saliency (DSS) system has shown it is very useful to add short connections to the network and supervising on the side output. In this work, we propose a new SOD system which aims at designing a more efficient and effective way to pass back global information. Richer and Deeper Supervision (RDS) is applied to better combine features from each side output without demanding much extra computational space. Meanwhile, the backbone network used for SOD is normally pre-trained on the object classification dataset, ImageNet. But the pre-trained model has been trained on cropped images in order to only focus on distinguishing features within the region of the object. But the ignored background information is also significant in the task of SOD. We try to solve this problem by introducing the training data designed for object detection. A coarse global information is learned based on an entire image with its bounding box before training on the SOD dataset. The large-scale of object images can slightly improve the performance of SOD. Our experiment shows the proposed RDS network achieves the state-of-the-art results on five public SOD datasets.
Early SOD methods are mainly based on hand-crafted features to capture saliency information, e.g. global contrast @cite_38 , multiple color spaces @cite_25 , clustering on reconstruction error @cite_34 and objectness cues @cite_33 . But traditional methods can hardly outperform CNN-based because low-level features are not rich enough to encode saliency information. In this section, we mainly discuss CNN-based state-of-the-art methods because they are more related to our work.
@cite_38 @cite_34 @cite_25 @cite_33
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Recent Salient Object Detection (SOD) systems are mostly based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). Specifically, Deeply Supervised Saliency (DSS) system has shown it is very useful to add short connections to the network and supervising on the side output. In this work, we propose a new SOD system which aims at designing a more efficient and effective way to pass back global information. Richer and Deeper Supervision (RDS) is applied to better combine features from each side output without demanding much extra computational space. Meanwhile, the backbone network used for SOD is normally pre-trained on the object classification dataset, ImageNet. But the pre-trained model has been trained on cropped images in order to only focus on distinguishing features within the region of the object. But the ignored background information is also significant in the task of SOD. We try to solve this problem by introducing the training data designed for object detection. A coarse global information is learned based on an entire image with its bounding box before training on the SOD dataset. The large-scale of object images can slightly improve the performance of SOD. Our experiment shows the proposed RDS network achieves the state-of-the-art results on five public SOD datasets. Numerous efforts have been made to design various low-level saliency cues for RGBD saliency detection, such as color and depth contrast features as well as background and color compactness priors. However, how these low-level saliency cues interact with each other and how they can be effectively incorporated to generate a master saliency map remain challenging problems. In this paper, we design a new convolutional neural network (CNN) to automatically learn the interaction mechanism for RGBD salient object detection. In contrast to existing works, in which raw image pixels are fed directly to the CNN, the proposed method takes advantage of the knowledge obtained in traditional saliency detection by adopting various flexible and interpretable saliency feature vectors as inputs. This guides the CNN to learn a combination of existing features to predict saliency more effectively, which presents a less complex problem than operating on the pixels directly. We then integrate a superpixel-based Laplacian propagation framework with the trained CNN to extract a spatially consistent saliency map by exploiting the intrinsic structure of the input image. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experimental evaluations on three data sets demonstrate that the proposed method consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. Typically, a salient object detection (SOD) model faces opposite requirements in processing object interiors and boundaries. The features of interiors should be invariant to strong appearance change so as to pop-out the salient object as a whole, while the features of boundaries should be selective to slight appearance change to distinguish salient objects and background. To address this selectivity-invariance dilemma, we propose a novel boundary-aware network with successive dilation for image-based SOD. In this network, the feature selectivity at boundaries is enhanced by incorporating a boundary localization stream, while the feature invariance at interiors is guaranteed with a complex interior perception stream. Moreover, a transition compensation stream is adopted to amend the probable failures in transitional regions between interiors and boundaries. In particular, an integrated successive dilation module is proposed to enhance the feature invariance at interiors and transitional regions. Extensive experiments on six datasets show that the proposed approach outperforms 16 state-of-the-art methods. Separating an image into reflectance and shading layers poses a challenge for learning approaches because no large corpus of precise and realistic ground truth decompositions exists. The Intrinsic Images in the Wild (IIW) dataset provides a sparse set of relative human reflectance judgments, which serves as a standard benchmark for intrinsic images. A number of methods use IIW to learn statistical dependencies between the images and their reflectance layer. Although learning plays an important role for high performance, we show that a standard signal processing technique achieves performance on par with current state-of-the-art. We propose a loss function for CNN learning of dense reflectance predictions. Our results show a simple pixel-wise decision, without any context or prior knowledge, is sufficient to provide a strong baseline on IIW. This sets a competitive baseline which only two other approaches surpass. We then develop a joint bilateral filtering method that implements strong prior knowledge about reflectance constancy. This filtering operation can be applied to any intrinsic image algorithm and we improve several previous results achieving a new state-of-the-art on IIW. Our findings suggest that the effect of learning-based approaches may have been over-estimated so far. Explicit prior knowledge is still at least as important to obtain high performance in intrinsic image decompositions.