Salient Object Detection via Recurrently Aggregating Spatial Attention Weighted Cross-Level Deep Features

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel deep saliency detection network by recurrently aggregating and refining features in a cross-level and spatial attention-aware manner. In this way, the features integrated from multiple layers can be used to refine layer-wise features step by step and the complementary information in different layers can be fully captured for detecting salient objects with different scales, i.e., the features integrated from low-level layers can serve to refine the details of detected salient objects while the features integrated from high-level layers with semantic information can benefit the locating of salient objects. In addition, by considering that only partial regions of an image are salient, we embed a spatial attention-aware module to suppress the non-salient regions and highlight salient objects. Finally, different saliency detection results from different layers are fused to generate the final saliency map. Experimental results on five benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms other 14 state-of-the-art competitors.