# RGB-D Salient Object Detection: A Survey

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.00230 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.00230/

## Key facts

- Cited by 73 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 1 Aug 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 73)

- [Visual Saliency Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.12099/) (2021)
- [Salient Object Detection via Integrity Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.07663/) (2021)
- [Full-Duplex Strategy for Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03151/) (2021)
- [Specificity-preserving RGB-D Saliency Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08162/) (2021)
- [Can SAM Segment Polyps?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07583/) (2023)
- [SC-DepthV3: Robust Self-supervised Monocular Depth Estimation for Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.03660/) (2022)
- [Source-free Depth for Object Pop-out](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05370/) (2022)
- [ZoomNeXt: A Unified Collaborative Pyramid Network for Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.20208/) (2023)
- [CAVER: Cross-Modal View-Mixed Transformer for Bi-Modal Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02363/) (2021)
- [Advances in Deep Concealed Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11234/) (2023)
- [A comprehensive review of Binary Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06804/) (2021)
- [MMANet: Margin-aware Distillation and Modality-aware Regularization for Incomplete Multimodal Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08028/) (2023)
- [CIR-Net: Cross-modality Interaction and Refinement for RGB-D Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02843/) (2022)
- [Does Thermal Really Always Matter for RGB-T Salient Object Detection?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04266/) (2022)
- [RGB-D Salient Object Detection via 3D Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10241/) (2021)
- [Depth Quality-Inspired Feature Manipulation for Efficient RGB-D Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.01779/) (2021)
- [Group Collaborative Learning for Co-Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01108/) (2021)
- [HiDAnet: RGB-D Salient Object Detection via Hierarchical Depth Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.07405/) (2023)
- [VST++: Efficient and Stronger Visual Saliency Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11725/) (2023)
- [HRTransNet: HRFormer-Driven Two-Modality Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.03036/) (2023)
- [Point-aware Interaction and CNN-induced Refinement Network for RGB-D Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08930/) (2023)
- [Salient Objects in Clutter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03053/) (2021)
- [Alignment-Free RGBT Salient Object Detection: Semantics-guided Asymmetric Correlation Network and A Unified Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00917/) (2024)
- [Robust Multimodal Learning via Representation Decoupling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04458/) (2024)
- [Boosting Multimodal Learning via Disentangled Gradient Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.10213/) (2025)
- [BTS-Net: Bi-directional Transfer-and-Selection Network For RGB-D Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01784/) (2021)
- [FakeNews: GAN-based generation of realistic 3D volumetric data -- A systematic review and taxonomy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01390/) (2022)
- [RGB-D Salient Object Detection with Ubiquitous Target Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.03425/) (2021)
- [Light Field Saliency Detection with Dual Local Graph Learning andReciprocative Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00698/) (2021)
- [Promoting Saliency From Depth: Deep Unsupervised RGB-D Saliency Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.07179/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Salient object detection (SOD), which simulates the human visual perception system to locate the most attractive object(s) in a scene, has been widely applied to various computer vision tasks. Now, with the advent of depth sensors, depth maps with affluent spatial information that can be beneficial in boosting the performance of SOD, can easily be captured. Although various RGB-D based SOD models with promising performance have been proposed over the past several years, an in-depth understanding of these models and challenges in this topic remains lacking. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey of RGB-D based SOD models from various perspectives, and review related benchmark datasets in detail. Further, considering that the light field can also provide depth maps, we review SOD models and popular benchmark datasets from this domain as well. Moreover, to investigate the SOD ability of existing models, we carry out a comprehensive evaluation, as well as attribute-based evaluation of several representative RGB-D based SOD models. Finally, we discuss several challenges and open directions of RGB-D based SOD for future research. All collected models, benchmark datasets, source code links, datasets constructed for attribute-based evaluation, and codes for evaluation will be made publicly available at https://github.com/taozh2017/RGBDSODsurvey