# Lightweight Salient Object Detection in Optical Remote Sensing Images via Feature Correlation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.08049 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08049/

## Key facts

- Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 71 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Jan 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [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)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Delving Deep into Rectifiers: Surpassing Human-Level Performance on ImageNet Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.01852/) (2015)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [Holistically-Nested Edge Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.06375/) (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)
- [Hierarchical Question-Image Co-Attention for Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00061/) (2016)
- [EGNet:Edge Guidance Network for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08297/) (2019)
- [A Simple Pooling-Based Design for Real-Time Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09569/) (2019)
- [Multi-scale Interactive Network for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09062/) (2020)
- [Deeply supervised salient object detection with short connections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.04849/) (2016)
- [Salient Object Detection in the Deep Learning Era: An In-Depth Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09146/) (2019)
- [Salient Object Detection: A Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1501.02741/) (2015)
- [Suppress and Balance: A Simple Gated Network for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08074/) (2020)
- [Global Context-Aware Progressive Aggregation Network for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00651/) (2020)
- [Highly Efficient Salient Object Detection with 100K Parameters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.05643/) (2020)
- [Dense Attention Fluid Network for Salient Object Detection in Optical Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13144/) (2020)
- [Review of Visual Saliency Detection with Comprehensive Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.03391/) (2018)
- [Nested Network with Two-Stream Pyramid for Salient Object Detection in Optical Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08462/) (2019)
- [Cross-Modal Weighting Network for RGB-D Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.04901/) (2020)
- [A Parallel Down-Up Fusion Network for Salient Object Detection in Optical Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.00793/) (2020)
- [Multi-Content Complementation Network for Salient Object Detection in Optical Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01932/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [RGB-T Semantic Segmentation with Location, Activation, and Sharpening](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.14530/) (2022)
- [Salient Object Detection in Optical Remote Sensing Images Driven by Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.08206/) (2023)
- [Lightweight Salient Object Detection in Optical Remote-Sensing Images via Semantic Matching and Edge Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.02778/) (2023)
- [United Domain Cognition Network for Salient Object Detection in Optical Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.06703/) (2024)
- [Dual-Perspective United Transformer for Object Segmentation in Optical Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21866/) (2025)
- [Boundary-semantic collaborative guidance network with dual-stream feedback mechanism for salient object detection in optical remote sensing imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.02867/) (2023)
- [WXSOD: A Benchmark for Robust Salient Object Detection in Adverse Weather Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.12250/) (2025)
- [Texture-Semantic Collaboration Network for ORSI Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03548/) (2023)
- [Localization, balance and affinity: a stronger multifaceted collaborative salient object detector in remote sensing images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23991/) (2024)
- [RSSOD-Bench: A large-scale benchmark dataset for Salient Object Detection in Optical Remote Sensing Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02351/) (2023)
- [Hyperspectral Remote Sensing Images Salient Object Detection: The First Benchmark Dataset and Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.02416/) (2025)
- [RDNet: Region Proportion-Aware Dynamic Adaptive Salient Object Detection Network in Optical Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.12215/) (2026)
- [IPDiff: Diffusion-driven ORSI Salient Object Detection with Information Reconstruction and Multi-Prior Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.03696/) (2026)
- [Attention Guided Network for Salient Object Detection in Optical Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01755/) (2022)
- [Global Context Aggregation Network for Lightweight Saliency Detection of Surface Defects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.12641/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Salient object detection in optical remote sensing images (ORSI-SOD) has been widely explored for understanding ORSIs. However, previous methods focus mainly on improving the detection accuracy while neglecting the cost in memory and computation, which may hinder their real-world applications. In this paper, we propose a novel lightweight ORSI-SOD solution, named CorrNet, to address these issues. In CorrNet, we first lighten the backbone (VGG-16) and build a lightweight subnet for feature extraction. Then, following the coarse-to-fine strategy, we generate an initial coarse saliency map from high-level semantic features in a Correlation Module (CorrM). The coarse saliency map serves as the location guidance for low-level features. In CorrM, we mine the object location information between high-level semantic features through the cross-layer correlation operation. Finally, based on low-level detailed features, we refine the coarse saliency map in the refinement subnet equipped with Dense Lightweight Refinement Blocks, and produce the final fine saliency map. By reducing the parameters and computations of each component, CorrNet ends up having only 4.09M parameters and running with 21.09G FLOPs. Experimental results on two public datasets demonstrate that our lightweight CorrNet achieves competitive or even better performance compared with 26 state-of-the-art methods (including 16 large CNN-based methods and 2 lightweight methods), and meanwhile enjoys the clear memory and run time efficiency. The code and results of our method are available at https://github.com/MathLee/CorrNet.