# To be Critical: Self-Calibrated Weakly Supervised Learning for Salient Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.01770 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01770/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Sep 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [Learning Deep Features for Discriminative Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.04150/) (2015)
- [Structure-measure: A New Way to Evaluate Foreground Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.00786/) (2017)
- [Enhanced-alignment Measure for Binary Foreground Map Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.10421/) (2018)
- [Weakly Supervised Learning of Instance Segmentation with Inter-pixel Relations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05044/) (2019)
- [EGNet:Edge Guidance Network for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08297/) (2019)
- [Cascaded Partial Decoder for Fast and Accurate Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08739/) (2019)
- [Multi-scale Interactive Network for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09062/) (2020)
- [The Secrets of Salient Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2807/) (2014)
- [Deeply supervised salient object detection with short connections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.04849/) (2016)
- [Visual Saliency Based on Multiscale Deep Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.08663/) (2015)
- [F3Net: Fusion, Feedback and Focus for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11445/) (2019)
- [Single-Stage Semantic Segmentation from Image Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08104/) (2020)
- [Salient Object Detection: A Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1501.02741/) (2015)
- [Pyramid Feature Attention Network for Saliency detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.00179/) (2019)
- [Weakly-Supervised Salient Object Detection via Scribble Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07685/) (2020)
- [Dense Attention Fluid Network for Salient Object Detection in Optical Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13144/) (2020)
- [Structure-Consistent Weakly Supervised Salient Object Detection with Local Saliency Coherence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.04404/) (2020)
- [Selectivity or Invariance: Boundary-aware Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.10066/) (2018)
- [DPANet: Depth Potentiality-Aware Gated Attention Network for RGB-D Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08608/) (2020)
- [Multi-source weak supervision for saliency detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00566/) (2019)
- [Weakly Supervised Salient Object Detection Using Image Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.06503/) (2018)
- [Online Tracking by Learning Discriminative Saliency Map with Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.06796/) (2015)
- [Co-saliency Detection for RGBD Images Based on Multi-constraint Feature Matching and Cross Label Propagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.05172/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Sketch2Saliency: Learning to Detect Salient Objects from Human Drawings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11502/) (2023)
- [Mutual Information Regularization for Weakly-supervised RGB-D Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03630/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Weakly-supervised salient object detection (WSOD) aims to develop saliency models using image-level annotations. Despite of the success of previous works, explorations on an effective training strategy for the saliency network and accurate matches between image-level annotations and salient objects are still inadequate. In this work, 1) we propose a self-calibrated training strategy by explicitly establishing a mutual calibration loop between pseudo labels and network predictions, liberating the saliency network from error-prone propagation caused by pseudo labels. 2) we prove that even a much smaller dataset (merely 1.8% of ImageNet) with well-matched annotations can facilitate models to achieve better performance as well as generalizability. This sheds new light on the development of WSOD and encourages more contributions to the community. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms all the existing WSOD methods by adopting the self-calibrated strategy only. Steady improvements are further achieved by training on the proposed dataset. Additionally, our method achieves 94.7% of the performance of fully-supervised methods on average. And what is more, the fully supervised models adopting our predicted results as "ground truths" achieve successful results (95.6% for BASNet and 97.3% for ITSD on F-measure), while costing only 0.32% of labeling time for pixel-level annotation.