# TriTransNet: RGB-D Salient Object Detection with a Triplet Transformer Embedding Network

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.03990 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03990/

## Key facts

- Cited by 45 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 56 of its 90 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Aug 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 56)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12122/) (2021)
- [TransUNet: Transformers Make Strong Encoders for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04306/) (2021)
- [Rethinking Semantic Segmentation from a Sequence-to-Sequence Perspective with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15840/) (2020)
- [Tokens-to-Token ViT: Training Vision Transformers from Scratch on ImageNet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11986/) (2021)
- [CvT: Introducing Convolutions to Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15808/) (2021)
- [PCT: Point cloud transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09688/) (2020)
- [TrackFormer: Multi-Object Tracking with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.02702/) (2021)
- [Structure-measure: A New Way to Evaluate Foreground Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.00786/) (2017)
- [Transformer Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15436/) (2021)
- [Enhanced-alignment Measure for Binary Foreground Map Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.10421/) (2018)
- [Visual Transformers: Token-based Image Representation and Processing for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03677/) (2020)
- [Escaping the Big Data Paradigm with Compact Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05704/) (2021)
- [TransFuse: Fusing Transformers and CNNs for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.08005/) (2021)
- [LocalViT: Analyzing Locality in Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05707/) (2021)
- [CoTr: Efficiently Bridging CNN and Transformer for 3D Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03024/) (2021)
- [Co-Scale Conv-Attentional Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06399/) (2021)
- [Cascaded Partial Decoder for Fast and Accurate Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08739/) (2019)
- [Multi-Scale Vision Longformer: A New Vision Transformer for High-Resolution Image Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15358/) (2021)
- [F3Net: Fusion, Feedback and Focus for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11445/) (2019)
- [High-Fidelity Pluralistic Image Completion with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14031/) (2021)
- [Rethinking RGB-D Salient Object Detection: Models, Data Sets, and Large-Scale Benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.06781/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 45)

- [CMX: Cross-Modal Fusion for RGB-X Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04838/) (2022)
- [C2Former: Calibrated and Complementary Transformer for RGB-Infrared Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16175/) (2023)
- [CAVER: Cross-Modal View-Mixed Transformer for Bi-Modal Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02363/) (2021)
- [GeminiFusion: Efficient Pixel-wise Multimodal Fusion for Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01210/) (2024)
- [HiDAnet: RGB-D Salient Object Detection via Hierarchical Depth Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.07405/) (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)
- [Fantastic Animals and Where to Find Them: Segment Any Marine Animal with Dual SAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04996/) (2024)
- [Towards Diverse Binary Segmentation via A Simple yet General Gated Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10396/) (2023)
- [Salient Object Detection in Optical Remote Sensing Images Driven by Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.08206/) (2023)
- [MAS-SAM: Segment Any Marine Animal with Aggregated Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15700/) (2024)
- [Weakly Supervised Video Salient Object Detection via Point Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07269/) (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)
- [Salient Object Detection in RGB-D Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15482/) (2023)
- [Quality-aware Selective Fusion Network for V-D-T Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07655/) (2024)
- [GroupTransNet: Group Transformer Network for RGB-D Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10785/) (2022)
- [Co-Salient Object Detection with Semantic-Level Consensus Extraction and Dispersion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07753/) (2023)
- [Hybrid-Fusion Transformer for Multisequence MRI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.01308/) (2023)
- [ViDSOD-100: A New Dataset and a Baseline Model for RGB-D Video Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12536/) (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)
- [MutualFormer: Multi-Modality Representation Learning via Cross-Diffusion Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01177/) (2021)
- [DFTR: Depth-supervised Fusion Transformer for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06429/) (2022)
- [WXSOD: A Benchmark for Robust Salient Object Detection in Adverse Weather Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.12250/) (2025)
- [Dual Swin-Transformer based Mutual Interactive Network for RGB-D Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.03105/) (2022)
- [Mirror Complementary Transformer Network for RGB-thermal Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.03558/) (2022)
- [ComPtr: Towards Diverse Bi-source Dense Prediction Tasks via A Simple yet General Complementary Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.12349/) (2023)
- [MFEViT: A Robust Lightweight Transformer-based Network for Multimodal 2D+3D Facial Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.13086/) (2021)
- [Depth-guided Texture Diffusion for Image Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.09097/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Salient object detection is the pixel-level dense prediction task which can highlight the prominent object in the scene. Recently U-Net framework is widely used, and continuous convolution and pooling operations generate multi-level features which are complementary with each other. In view of the more contribution of high-level features for the performance, we propose a triplet transformer embedding module to enhance them by learning long-range dependencies across layers. It is the first to use three transformer encoders with shared weights to enhance multi-level features. By further designing scale adjustment module to process the input, devising three-stream decoder to process the output and attaching depth features to color features for the multi-modal fusion, the proposed triplet transformer embedding network (TriTransNet) achieves the state-of-the-art performance in RGB-D salient object detection, and pushes the performance to a new level. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed modules and the competition of TriTransNet.