Towards High-Resolution Salient Object Detection

Deep neural network based methods have made a significant breakthrough in salient object detection. However, they are typically limited to input images with low resolutions (400×400 pixels or less). Little effort has been made to train neural networks to directly handle salient object segmentation in high-resolution images. This paper pushes forward high-resolution saliency detection, and contributes a new dataset, named High-Resolution Salient Object Detection (HRSOD) dataset. To our best knowledge, HRSOD is the first high-resolution saliency detection dataset to date. As another contribution, we also propose a novel approach, which incorporates both global semantic information and local high-resolution details, to address this challenging task. More specifically, our approach consists of a Global Semantic Network (GSN), a Local Refinement Network (LRN) and a Global-Local Fusion Network (GLFN). The GSN extracts the global semantic information based on downsampled entire image. Guided by the results of GSN, the LRN focuses on some local regions and progressively produces high-resolution predictions. The GLFN is further proposed to enforce spatial consistency and boost performance. Experiments illustrate that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on high-resolution saliency datasets by a large margin, and achieves comparable or even better performance than them on some widely used saliency benchmarks.