Existing state-of-the-art salient object detection networks rely on aggregating multi-level features of pre-trained convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Compared to high-level features, low-level features contribute less to performance but cost more computations 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 shallower layers for acceleration. On the other hand, we observe that integrating features of deeper layers obtain relatively precise saliency map. Therefore we directly utilize generated saliency map to refine the features of backbone network. 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 performance but also runs much faster than existing models. Besides, the proposed framework is further applied to improve existing multi-level feature aggregation models and significantly improve their efficiency and accuracy.
 Recent progresses in salient object detection have exploited the boundary prior, or background information, to assist other saliency cues such as contrast, achieving state-of-the-art results. However, their usage of boundary prior is very simple, fragile, and the integration with other cues is mostly heuristic. In this work, we present new methods to address these issues. First, we propose a robust background measure, called boundary connectivity. It characterizes the spatial layout of image regions with respect to image boundaries and is much more robust. It has an intuitive geometrical interpretation and presents unique benefits that are absent in previous saliency measures. Second, we propose a principled optimization framework to integrate multiple low level cues, including our background measure, to obtain clean and uniform saliency maps. Our formulation is intuitive, efficient and achieves state-of-the-art results on several benchmark datasets. A visual attention system, inspired by the behavior and the neuronal architecture of the early primate visual system, is presented. Multiscale image features are combined into a single topographical saliency map. A dynamical neural network then selects attended locations in order of decreasing saliency. The system breaks down the complex problem of scene understanding by rapidly selecting, in a computationally efficient manner, conspicuous locations to be analyzed in detail. Automatic estimation of salient object regions across images, without any prior assumption or knowledge of the contents of the corresponding scenes, enhances many computer vision and computer graphics applications. We introduce a regional contrast based salient object detection algorithm, which simultaneously evaluates global contrast differences and spatial weighted coherence scores. The proposed algorithm is simple, efficient, naturally multi-scale, and produces full-resolution, high-quality saliency maps. These saliency maps are further used to initialize a novel iterative version of GrabCut, namely SaliencyCut, for high quality unsupervised salient object segmentation. We extensively evaluated our algorithm using traditional salient object detection datasets, as well as a more challenging Internet image dataset. Our experimental results demonstrate that our algorithm consistently outperforms 15 existing salient object detection and segmentation methods, yielding higher precision and better recall rates. We also show that our algorithm can be used to efficiently extract salient object masks from Internet images, enabling effective sketch-based image retrieval (SBIR) via simple shape comparisons. Despite such noisy internet images, where the saliency regions are ambiguous, our saliency guided image retrieval achieves a superior retrieval rate compared with state-of-the-art SBIR methods, and additionally provides important target object region information. Detection of visually salient image regions is useful for applications like object segmentation, adaptive compression, and object recognition. In this paper, we introduce a method for salient region detection that outputs full resolution saliency maps with well-defined boundaries of salient objects. These boundaries are preserved by retaining substantially more frequency content from the original image than other existing techniques. Our method exploits features of color and luminance, is simple to implement, and is computationally efficient. We compare our algorithm to five state-of-the-art salient region detection methods with a frequency domain analysis, ground truth, and a salient object segmentation application. Our method outperforms the five algorithms both on the ground-truth evaluation and on the segmentation task by achieving both higher precision and better recall. Detecting and segmenting salient objects from natural scenes, often referred to as salient object detection, has attracted great interest in computer vision. While many models have been proposed and several applications have emerged, a deep understanding of achievements and issues remains lacking. We aim to provide a comprehensive review of recent progress in salient object detection and situate this field among other closely related areas such as generic scene segmentation, object proposal generation, and saliency for fixation prediction. Covering 228 publications, we survey i) roots, key concepts, and tasks, ii) core techniques and main modeling trends, and iii) datasets and evaluation metrics for salient object detection. We also discuss open problems such as evaluation metrics and dataset bias in model performance, and suggest future research directions.