Fixation guided network for salient object detection

Abstract

Convolutional neural network (CNN) based salient object detection (SOD) has achieved great development in recent years. However, in some challenging cases, i.e. small-scale salient object, low contrast salient object and cluttered background, existing salient object detect methods are still not satisfying. In order to accurately detect salient objects, SOD networks need to fix the position of most salient part. Fixation prediction (FP) focuses on the most visual attractive regions, so we think it could assist in locating salient objects. As far as we know, there are few methods jointly consider SOD and FP tasks. In this paper, we propose a fixation guided salient object detection network (FGNet) to leverage the correlation between SOD and FP. FGNet consists of two branches to deal with fixation prediction and salient object detection respectively. Further, an effective feature cooperation module (FCM) is proposed to fuse complementary information between the two branches. Extensive experiments on four popular datasets and comparisons with twelve state-of-the-art methods show that the proposed FGNet well captures the main context of images and locates salient objects more accurately.