# Weakly-Supervised Salient Object Detection via Scribble Annotations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.07685 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07685/

## Key facts

- Cited by 96 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 17 Mar 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 96)

- [Simultaneously Localize, Segment and Rank the Camouflaged Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04011/) (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)
- [Weakly-Supervised Concealed Object Segmentation with SAM-based Pseudo Labeling and Multi-scale Feature Grouping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11003/) (2023)
- [One Thing One Click: A Self-Training Approach for Weakly Supervised 3D Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02246/) (2021)
- [Feature Shrinkage Pyramid for Camouflaged Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14816/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Learning Generative Vision Transformer with Energy-Based Latent Space for Saliency Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.13528/) (2021)
- [RGB-D Saliency Detection via Cascaded Mutual Information Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07246/) (2021)
- [Weakly-Supervised Camouflaged Object Detection with Scribble Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.14083/) (2022)
- [Relax Image-Specific Prompt Requirement in SAM: A Single Generic Prompt for Segmenting Camouflaged Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07374/) (2023)
- [Disentangled High Quality Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03551/) (2021)
- [Referring Image Segmentation Using Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14575/) (2023)
- [Weakly Supervised Video Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02391/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Semantic Segmentation In-the-Wild Without Seeing Any Segmentation Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03185/) (2021)
- [Texture-guided Saliency Distilling for Unsupervised Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05921/) (2022)
- [ScribFormer: Transformer Makes CNN Work Better for Scribble-based Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02029/) (2024)
- [SAM-COD: SAM-guided Unified Framework for Weakly-Supervised Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10760/) (2024)
- [Background-Click Supervision for Temporal Action Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12449/) (2021)
- [Weakly-supervised Instance Segmentation via Class-agnostic Learning with Salient Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01526/) (2021)
- [A Weakly Supervised Learning Framework for Salient Object Detection via Hybrid Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.02957/) (2022)
- [Leveraging Hallucinations to Reduce Manual Prompt Dependency in Promptable Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15205/) (2024)
- [Salient Objects in Clutter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03053/) (2021)
- [Towards Deeper Understanding of Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11333/) (2022)
- [Generative Transformer for Accurate and Reliable Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10127/) (2021)
- [Beyond Monocular Deraining: Parallel Stereo Deraining Network Via Semantic Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03830/) (2021)
- [Few-Cost Salient Object Detection with Adversarial-Paced Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01928/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Compared with laborious pixel-wise dense labeling, it is much easier to label data by scribbles, which only costs 1~2 seconds to label one image. However, using scribble labels to learn salient object detection has not been explored. In this paper, we propose a weakly-supervised salient object detection model to learn saliency from such annotations. In doing so, we first relabel an existing large-scale salient object detection dataset with scribbles, namely S-DUTS dataset. Since object structure and detail information is not identified by scribbles, directly training with scribble labels will lead to saliency maps of poor boundary localization. To mitigate this problem, we propose an auxiliary edge detection task to localize object edges explicitly, and a gated structure-aware loss to place constraints on the scope of structure to be recovered. Moreover, we design a scribble boosting scheme to iteratively consolidate our scribble annotations, which are then employed as supervision to learn high-quality saliency maps. As existing saliency evaluation metrics neglect to measure structure alignment of the predictions, the saliency map ranking metric may not comply with human perception. We present a new metric, termed saliency structure measure, to measure the structure alignment of the predicted saliency maps, which is more consistent with human perception. Extensive experiments on six benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method not only outperforms existing weakly-supervised/unsupervised methods, but also is on par with several fully-supervised state-of-the-art models. Our code and data is publicly available at https://github.com/JingZhang617/ScribbleSaliency.