# Reverse Attention for Salient Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.09940 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.09940/

## Key facts

- Cited by 113 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 26 Jul 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 113)

- [Concealed Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.10274/) (2021)
- [Camouflaged Object Segmentation with Distraction Mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10475/) (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)
- [Highly Accurate Dichotomous Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03041/) (2022)
- [Recent advances and clinical applications of deep learning in medical image analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.13381/) (2021)
- [MISSFormer: An Effective Medical Image Segmentation Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07162/) (2021)
- [EMCAD: Efficient Multi-scale Convolutional Attention Decoding for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.06880/) (2024)
- [Pyramid Grafting Network for One-Stage High Resolution Saliency Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05041/) (2022)
- [UACANet: Uncertainty Augmented Context Attention for Polyp Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.02368/) (2021)
- [Attention, please! A survey of Neural Attention Models in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16775/) (2021)
- [Enhanced Boundary Learning for Glass-like Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15734/) (2021)
- [CaraNet: Context Axial Reverse Attention Network for Segmentation of Small Medical Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13366/) (2023)
- [Boundary-Aware Segmentation Network for Mobile and Web Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.04704/) (2021)
- [Fast Camouflaged Object Detection via Edge-based Reversible Re-calibration Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.03216/) (2021)
- [Visual Attention Methods in Deep Learning: An In-Depth Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07756/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Multi-scale Hierarchical Vision Transformer with Cascaded Attention Decoding for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16892/) (2023)
- [Segment Anything Model (SAM) Meets Glass: Mirror and Transparent Objects Cannot Be Easily Detected](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.00278/) (2023)
- [TRACER: Extreme Attention Guided Salient Object Tracing Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07380/) (2021)
- [OSFormer: One-Stage Camouflaged Instance Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02255/) (2022)
- [ColonFormer: An Efficient Transformer based Method for Colon Polyp Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.08473/) (2022)
- [MEGANet: Multi-Scale Edge-Guided Attention Network for Weak Boundary Polyp Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03329/) (2023)
- [Weakly-Supervised Salient Object Detection Using Point Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11652/) (2022)
- [Dual Attention-in-Attention Model for Joint Rain Streak and Raindrop Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07051/) (2021)
- [SAM-COD: SAM-guided Unified Framework for Weakly-Supervised Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10760/) (2024)
- [G-CASCADE: Efficient Cascaded Graph Convolutional Decoding for 2D Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16175/) (2023)
- [Weakly-supervised Instance Segmentation via Class-agnostic Learning with Salient Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01526/) (2021)
- [Salient Objects in Clutter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03053/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Benefit from the quick development of deep learning techniques, salient object detection has achieved remarkable progresses recently. However, there still exists following two major challenges that hinder its application in embedded devices, low resolution output and heavy model weight. To this end, this paper presents an accurate yet compact deep network for efficient salient object detection. More specifically, given a coarse saliency prediction in the deepest layer, we first employ residual learning to learn side-output residual features for saliency refinement, which can be achieved with very limited convolutional parameters while keep accuracy. Secondly, we further propose reverse attention to guide such side-output residual learning in a top-down manner. By erasing the current predicted salient regions from side-output features, the network can eventually explore the missing object parts and details which results in high resolution and accuracy. Experiments on six benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach compares favorably against state-of-the-art methods, and with advantages in terms of simplicity, efficiency (45 FPS) and model size (81 MB).