# Depth Quality-Inspired Feature Manipulation for Efficient RGB-D Salient Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.01779 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.01779/

## Key facts

- Cited by 33 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 46 of its 75 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Jul 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [Pyramid Scene Parsing Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01105/) (2016)
- [V-Net: Fully Convolutional Neural Networks for Volumetric Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04797/) (2016)
- [Structure-measure: A New Way to Evaluate Foreground Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.00786/) (2017)
- [PraNet: Parallel Reverse Attention Network for Polyp Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11392/) (2020)
- [Enhanced-alignment Measure for Binary Foreground Map Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.10421/) (2018)
- [Concealed Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.10274/) (2021)
- [Salient Object Detection in the Deep Learning Era: An In-Depth Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09146/) (2019)
- [Camouflaged Object Segmentation with Distraction Mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10475/) (2021)
- [Rethinking RGB-D Salient Object Detection: Models, Data Sets, and Large-Scale Benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.06781/) (2019)
- [Salient Object Detection: A Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1501.02741/) (2015)
- [UC-Net: Uncertainty Inspired RGB-D Saliency Detection via Conditional Variational Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05763/) (2020)
- [Amulet: Aggregating Multi-level Convolutional Features for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.02001/) (2017)
- [Deep Dual-resolution Networks for Real-time and Accurate Semantic Segmentation of Road Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06085/) (2021)
- [JL-DCF: Joint Learning and Densely-Cooperative Fusion Framework for RGB-D Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.08515/) (2020)
- [Progressively Normalized Self-Attention Network for Video Polyp Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08468/) (2021)
- [RGB-D Salient Object Detection: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.00230/) (2020)
- [Bi-Directional Cascade Network for Perceptual Edge Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10903/) (2019)
- [Hierarchical Dynamic Filtering Network for RGB-D Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.06227/) (2020)
- [A Single Stream Network for Robust and Real-time RGB-D Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.06811/) (2020)
- [Siamese Network for RGB-D Salient Object Detection and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.12134/) (2020)
- [Review of Visual Saliency Detection with Comprehensive Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.03391/) (2018)
- [Uncertainty Inspired RGB-D Saliency Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03075/) (2020)
- [Re-thinking Co-Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.03380/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [DepthFormer: Exploiting Long-Range Correlation and Local Information for Accurate Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14211/) (2022)
- [DFormer: Rethinking RGBD Representation Learning for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.09668/) (2023)
- [Source-free Depth for Object Pop-out](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05370/) (2022)
- [READ: Large-Scale Neural Scene Rendering for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.05509/) (2022)
- [Fast Camouflaged Object Detection via Edge-based Reversible Re-calibration Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.03216/) (2021)
- [Does Thermal Really Always Matter for RGB-T Salient Object Detection?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04266/) (2022)
- [HiDAnet: RGB-D Salient Object Detection via Hierarchical Depth Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.07405/) (2023)
- [Effectiveness Assessment of Recent Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04306/) (2024)
- [Point-aware Interaction and CNN-induced Refinement Network for RGB-D Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08930/) (2023)
- [Alignment-Free RGBT Salient Object Detection: Semantics-guided Asymmetric Correlation Network and A Unified Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00917/) (2024)
- [Learning Adaptive Fusion Bank for Multi-modal Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01127/) (2024)
- [Towards Diverse Binary Segmentation via A Simple yet General Gated Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10396/) (2023)
- [Joint Learning of Salient Object Detection, Depth Estimation and Contour Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04895/) (2022)
- [Robust RGB-D Fusion for Saliency Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01762/) (2022)
- [Object Segmentation by Mining Cross-Modal Semantics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10469/) (2023)
- [Rapid Salient Object Detection with Difference Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.01182/) (2025)
- [Salient Object Detection in RGB-D Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15482/) (2023)
- [Depth Awakens: A Depth-perceptual Attention Fusion Network for RGB-D Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.05614/) (2024)
- [MambaSOD: Dual Mamba-Driven Cross-Modal Fusion Network for RGB-D Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15015/) (2024)
- [Lightweight RGB-D Salient Object Detection from a Speed-Accuracy Tradeoff Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.04758/) (2025)
- [DFTR: Depth-supervised Fusion Transformer for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06429/) (2022)
- [Dual Swin-Transformer based Mutual Interactive Network for RGB-D Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.03105/) (2022)
- [All in One: RGB, RGB-D, and RGB-T Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.14746/) (2023)
- [PM-DETR: Domain Adaptive Prompt Memory for Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00313/) (2023)
- [Depth-guided Texture Diffusion for Image Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.09097/) (2024)
- [LEAF-Mamba: Local Emphatic and Adaptive Fusion State Space Model for RGB-D Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18683/) (2025)
- [STENet: Superpixel Token Enhancing Network for RGB-D Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.21999/) (2026)
- [SiaTrans: Siamese Transformer Network for RGB-D Salient Object Detection with Depth Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04224/) (2022)
- [Depth Quality-Inspired Feature Manipulation for Efficient RGB-D and Video Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.03918/) (2022)
- [A Spatial-Temporal Dual-Mode Mixed Flow Network for Panoramic Video Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09016/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

RGB-D salient object detection (SOD) recently has attracted increasing research interest by benefiting conventional RGB SOD with extra depth information. However, existing RGB-D SOD models often fail to perform well in terms of both efficiency and accuracy, which hinders their potential applications on mobile devices and real-world problems. An underlying challenge is that the model accuracy usually degrades when the model is simplified to have few parameters. To tackle this dilemma and also inspired by the fact that depth quality is a key factor influencing the accuracy, we propose a novel depth quality-inspired feature manipulation (DQFM) process, which is efficient itself and can serve as a gating mechanism for filtering depth features to greatly boost the accuracy. DQFM resorts to the alignment of low-level RGB and depth features, as well as holistic attention of the depth stream to explicitly control and enhance cross-modal fusion. We embed DQFM to obtain an efficient light-weight model called DFM-Net, where we also design a tailored depth backbone and a two-stage decoder for further efficiency consideration. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our DFM-Net achieves state-of-the-art accuracy when comparing to existing non-efficient models, and meanwhile runs at 140ms on CPU (2.2× faster than the prior fastest efficient model) with only ~8.5Mb model size (14.9% of the prior lightest). Our code will be available at https://github.com/zwbx/DFM-Net.