# Visual Saliency Based on Multiscale Deep Features

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1503.08663 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.08663/

## Key facts

- Cited by 185 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 30 Mar 2015.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 185)

- [Visual Saliency Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.12099/) (2021)
- [Zoom In and Out: A Mixed-scale Triplet Network for Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02688/) (2022)
- [Salient Object Detection via Integrity Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.07663/) (2021)
- [A Survey on Deep Learning Technique for Video Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.01153/) (2021)
- [Uncertainty-aware Joint Salient Object and Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02628/) (2021)
- [Highly Accurate Dichotomous Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03041/) (2022)
- [Weakly-Supervised Concealed Object Segmentation with SAM-based Pseudo Labeling and Multi-scale Feature Grouping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11003/) (2023)
- [SAM2-UNet: Segment Anything 2 Makes Strong Encoder for Natural and Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.08870/) (2024)
- [Pyramid Grafting Network for One-Stage High Resolution Saliency Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05041/) (2022)
- [VSCode: General Visual Salient and Camouflaged Object Detection with 2D Prompt Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15011/) (2023)
- [Learning Generative Vision Transformer with Energy-Based Latent Space for Saliency Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.13528/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Salient Object Detection with Spectral Cluster Voting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12614/) (2022)
- [Advances in Deep Concealed Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11234/) (2023)
- [nnMamba: 3D Biomedical Image Segmentation, Classification and Landmark Detection with State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03526/) (2024)
- [Seg-R1: Segmentation Can Be Surprisingly Simple with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.22624/) (2025)
- [Boundary-Aware Segmentation Network for Mobile and Web Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.04704/) (2021)
- [Text2Layer: Layered Image Generation using Latent Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09781/) (2023)
- [Revisiting Image Pyramid Structure for High Resolution Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09475/) (2022)
- [Disentangled High Quality Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03551/) (2021)
- [TRACER: Extreme Attention Guided Salient Object Tracing Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07380/) (2021)
- [MEDIRL: Predicting the Visual Attention of Drivers via Maximum Entropy Deep Inverse Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.07773/) (2019)
- [Weakly Supervised Video Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02391/) (2021)
- [VST++: Efficient and Stronger Visual Saliency Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11725/) (2023)
- [RUN: Reversible Unfolding Network for Concealed Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.18783/) (2025)
- [MFNet: Multi-filter Directive Network for Weakly Supervised Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01732/) (2021)
- [Weakly-Supervised Salient Object Detection Using Point Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11652/) (2022)
- [Texture-guided Saliency Distilling for Unsupervised Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05921/) (2022)
- [Densely Nested Top-Down Flows for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09133/) (2021)
- [A Simple yet Effective Network based on Vision Transformer for Camouflaged Object and Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18922/) (2024)
- [Dataset Enhancement with Instance-Level Augmentations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08249/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Visual saliency is a fundamental problem in both cognitive and computational sciences, including computer vision. In this CVPR 2015 paper, we discover that a high-quality visual saliency model can be trained with multiscale features extracted using a popular deep learning architecture, convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which have had many successes in visual recognition tasks. For learning such saliency models, we introduce a neural network architecture, which has fully connected layers on top of CNNs responsible for extracting features at three different scales. We then propose a refinement method to enhance the spatial coherence of our saliency results. Finally, aggregating multiple saliency maps computed for different levels of image segmentation can further boost the performance, yielding saliency maps better than those generated from a single segmentation. To promote further research and evaluation of visual saliency models, we also construct a new large database of 4447 challenging images and their pixelwise saliency annotation. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method is capable of achieving state-of-the-art performance on all public benchmarks, improving the F-Measure by 5.0% and 13.2% respectively on the MSRA-B dataset and our new dataset (HKU-IS), and lowering the mean absolute error by 5.7% and 35.1% respectively on these two datasets.