Suppress and Balance: A Simple Gated Network for Salient Object Detection
This work addresses key limitations in salient object detection for computer vision applications, representing an incremental improvement over existing methods.
The paper tackles the problems of interference control and unequal contributions of encoder blocks in salient object detection by proposing GateNet, a gated network with multilevel gate units and a dual branch structure, which achieves favorable performance against state-of-the-art methods on five datasets.
Most salient object detection approaches use U-Net or feature pyramid networks (FPN) as their basic structures. These methods ignore two key problems when the encoder exchanges information with the decoder: one is the lack of interference control between them, the other is without considering the disparity of the contributions of different encoder blocks. In this work, we propose a simple gated network (GateNet) to solve both issues at once. With the help of multilevel gate units, the valuable context information from the encoder can be optimally transmitted to the decoder. We design a novel gated dual branch structure to build the cooperation among different levels of features and improve the discriminability of the whole network. Through the dual branch design, more details of the saliency map can be further restored. In addition, we adopt the atrous spatial pyramid pooling based on the proposed "Fold" operation (Fold-ASPP) to accurately localize salient objects of various scales. Extensive experiments on five challenging datasets demonstrate that the proposed model performs favorably against most state-of-the-art methods under different evaluation metrics.