# Deep Unsupervised Saliency Detection: A Multiple Noisy Labeling Perspective

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.10910 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10910/

## Key facts

- Cited by 50 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 29 Mar 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 50)

- [Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation by Contrasting Object Mask Proposals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06191/) (2021)
- [Self-Supervised Transformers for Unsupervised Object Discovery using Normalized Cut](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.11539/) (2022)
- [Salient Object Detection via Integrity Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.07663/) (2021)
- [TokenCut: Segmenting Objects in Images and Videos with Self-supervised Transformer and Normalized Cut](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.00383/) (2022)
- [ClevrTex: A Texture-Rich Benchmark for Unsupervised Multi-Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.10265/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Object Localization: Observing the Background to Discover Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07834/) (2022)
- [Diffusion Models for Open-Vocabulary Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09316/) (2023)
- [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)
- [The Emergence of Objectness: Learning Zero-Shot Segmentation from Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06394/) (2021)
- [Finding an Unsupervised Image Segmenter in Each of Your Deep Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08127/) (2021)
- [Weakly-Supervised Camouflaged Object Detection with Scribble Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.14083/) (2022)
- [Guess What Moves: Unsupervised Video and Image Segmentation by Anticipating Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.07844/) (2022)
- [Object-aware Contrastive Learning for Debiased Scene Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.00049/) (2021)
- [Texture-guided Saliency Distilling for Unsupervised Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05921/) (2022)
- [SAM-COD: SAM-guided Unified Framework for Weakly-Supervised Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10760/) (2024)
- [A Weakly Supervised Learning Framework for Salient Object Detection via Hybrid Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.02957/) (2022)
- [MOVE: Unsupervised Movable Object Segmentation and Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07920/) (2022)
- [Salient Objects in Clutter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03053/) (2021)
- [Generative Transformer for Accurate and Reliable Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10127/) (2021)
- [Few-Cost Salient Object Detection with Adversarial-Paced Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01928/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Salient Object Detection Through Uncertainty-Aware Pseudo-Label Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13170/) (2022)
- [Learning to Detect Instance-level Salient Objects Using Complementary Image Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.10137/) (2021)
- [Promoting Saliency From Depth: Deep Unsupervised RGB-D Saliency Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.07179/) (2022)
- [Weakly-supervised Contrastive Learning for Unsupervised Object Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03376/) (2023)
- [Channel Exchanging Networks for Multimodal and Multitask Dense Image Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02252/) (2021)
- [UCOD-DPL: Unsupervised Camouflaged Object Detection via Dynamic Pseudo-label Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07087/) (2025)
- [Mutual Information Regularization for Weakly-supervised RGB-D Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03630/) (2023)
- [Pseudo Flow Consistency for Self-Supervised 6D Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10016/) (2023)
- [Characterizing and Improving the Robustness of Self-Supervised Learning through Background Augmentations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12719/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The success of current deep saliency detection methods heavily depends on the availability of large-scale supervision in the form of per-pixel labeling. Such supervision, while labor-intensive and not always possible, tends to hinder the generalization ability of the learned models. By contrast, traditional handcrafted features based unsupervised saliency detection methods, even though have been surpassed by the deep supervised methods, are generally dataset-independent and could be applied in the wild. This raises a natural question that "Is it possible to learn saliency maps without using labeled data while improving the generalization ability?". To this end, we present a novel perspective to unsupervised saliency detection through learning from multiple noisy labeling generated by "weak" and "noisy" unsupervised handcrafted saliency methods. Our end-to-end deep learning framework for unsupervised saliency detection consists of a latent saliency prediction module and a noise modeling module that work collaboratively and are optimized jointly. Explicit noise modeling enables us to deal with noisy saliency maps in a probabilistic way. Extensive experimental results on various benchmarking datasets show that our model not only outperforms all the unsupervised saliency methods with a large margin but also achieves comparable performance with the recent state-of-the-art supervised deep saliency methods.