SalED: Saliency prediction with a pithy encoder-decoder architecture sensing local and global information

Abstract

This paper proposes a deep convolutional neural network with a concise and effective encoder-decoder architecture for saliency prediction. Local and global contextual features make a considerable contribution to saliency prediction. In order to integrate and exploit these features more thoroughly, in the proposed pithy architecture, we deploy a dense and global context connection structure between the encoder and decoder, after that, a multi-scale readout module is designed to process various information from the previous portion of the decoder with different parallel mapping relationships for full-scale accurate results. Our model ranks first in light of multiple metrics on two famous saliency benchmarks and performs good generalization on other datasets. Besides, we evaluate the precision and the speed of our model with different backbones. The saliency prediction performance of VGGNet-Based, ResNet-based, and DenseNet-based model gradually increases while the speed also drops off. And the experiments illustrate that our model performs better than other models even if replacing the backbone of our model with the same backbone of the compared model. Therefore, we can provide optional versions of our model for different requirements of performance and efficiency.