# A Simple Pooling-Based Design for Real-Time Salient Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.09569 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09569/

## Key facts

- Cited by 212 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 21 Apr 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 212)

- [Concealed Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.10274/) (2021)
- [Simultaneously Localize, Segment and Rank the Camouflaged Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04011/) (2021)
- [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)
- [VisionLLM v2: An End-to-End Generalist Multimodal Large Language Model for Hundreds of Vision-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08394/) (2024)
- [Salient Object Detection via Integrity Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.07663/) (2021)
- [Uncertainty-aware Joint Salient Object and Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02628/) (2021)
- [Mutual Graph Learning for Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02613/) (2021)
- [The effectiveness of feature attribution methods and its correlation with automatic evaluation scores](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14944/) (2021)
- [Context-aware Cross-level Fusion Network for Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.12555/) (2021)
- [Class-agnostic Object Detection with Multi-modal Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11430/) (2021)
- [P2T: Pyramid Pooling Transformer for Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12011/) (2021)
- [High-resolution Iterative Feedback Network for Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11624/) (2022)
- [Leveraging Auxiliary Tasks with Affinity Learning for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.11787/) (2021)
- [SSUL: Semantic Segmentation with Unknown Label for Exemplar-based Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11562/) (2021)
- [Boundary-Guided Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.00794/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Object Localization: Observing the Background to Discover Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07834/) (2022)
- [Regional Semantic Contrast and Aggregation for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09653/) (2022)
- [CamoFormer: Masked Separable Attention for Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06570/) (2022)
- [Learning Generative Vision Transformer with Energy-Based Latent Space for Saliency Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.13528/) (2021)
- [L2G: A Simple Local-to-Global Knowledge Transfer Framework for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03206/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Salient Object Detection with Spectral Cluster Voting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12614/) (2022)
- [Source-free Depth for Object Pop-out](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05370/) (2022)
- [A Unified Transformer Framework for Group-based Segmentation: Co-Segmentation, Co-Saliency Detection and Video Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04708/) (2022)
- [Discriminative Region Suppression for Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07246/) (2021)
- [Enhanced Boundary Learning for Glass-like Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15734/) (2021)
- [ZoomNeXt: A Unified Collaborative Pyramid Network for Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.20208/) (2023)
- [Affinity Attention Graph Neural Network for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04054/) (2021)
- [Adaptive Context Selection for Polyp Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.04799/) (2023)
- [Advances in Deep Concealed Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11234/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We solve the problem of salient object detection by investigating how to expand the role of pooling in convolutional neural networks. Based on the U-shape architecture, we first build a global guidance module (GGM) upon the bottom-up pathway, aiming at providing layers at different feature levels the location information of potential salient objects. We further design a feature aggregation module (FAM) to make the coarse-level semantic information well fused with the fine-level features from the top-down pathway. By adding FAMs after the fusion operations in the top-down pathway, coarse-level features from the GGM can be seamlessly merged with features at various scales. These two pooling-based modules allow the high-level semantic features to be progressively refined, yielding detail enriched saliency maps. Experiment results show that our proposed approach can more accurately locate the salient objects with sharpened details and hence substantially improve the performance compared to the previous state-of-the-arts. Our approach is fast as well and can run at a speed of more than 30 FPS when processing a 300 × 400 image. Code can be found at http://mmcheng.net/poolnet/.