Semantic Distillation Guided Salient Object Detection

Most existing CNN-based salient object detection methods can identify local segmentation details like hair and animal fur, but often misinterpret the real saliency due to the lack of global contextual information caused by the subjectiveness of the SOD task and the locality of convolution layers. Moreover, due to the unrealistically expensive labeling costs, the current existing SOD datasets are insufficient to cover the real data distribution. The limitation and bias of the training data add additional difficulty to fully exploring the semantic association between object-to-object and object-to-environment in a given image. In this paper, we propose a semantic distillation guided SOD (SDG-SOD) method that produces accurate results by fusing semantically distilled knowledge from generated image captioning into the Vision-Transformer-based SOD framework. SDG-SOD can better uncover inter-objects and object-to-environment saliency and cover the gap between the subjective nature of SOD and its expensive labeling. Comprehensive experiments on five benchmark datasets demonstrate that the SDG-SOD outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches on four evaluation metrics, and largely improves the model performance on DUTS, ECSSD, DUT, HKU-IS, and PASCAL-S datasets.