# 3SD: Self-Supervised Saliency Detection With No Labels

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.04478 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04478/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 64 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Mar 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features by Contrasting Cluster Assignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09882/) (2020)
- [Learning Deep Features for Discriminative Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.04150/) (2015)
- [Unsupervised Feature Learning via Non-Parametric Instance-level Discrimination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01978/) (2018)
- [Contrastive Multiview Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05849/) (2019)
- [In Defense of the Triplet Loss for Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07737/) (2017)
- [Data-Efficient Image Recognition with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.09272/) (2019)
- [Structure-measure: A New Way to Evaluate Foreground Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.00786/) (2017)
- [U2-Net: Going Deeper with Nested U-Structure for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.09007/) (2020)
- [Enhanced-alignment Measure for Binary Foreground Map Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.10421/) (2018)
- [Approximating CNNs with Bag-of-local-Features models works surprisingly well on ImageNet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00760/) (2019)
- [BoxSup: Exploiting Bounding Boxes to Supervise Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.01640/) (2015)
- [Simple Does It: Weakly Supervised Instance and Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.07485/) (2016)
- [Cascaded Partial Decoder for Fast and Accurate Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08739/) (2019)
- [The Secrets of Salient Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2807/) (2014)
- [Visual Saliency Based on Multiscale Deep Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.08663/) (2015)
- [Visual Saliency Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.12099/) (2021)
- [Self-Supervised Transformers for Unsupervised Object Discovery using Normalized Cut](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.11539/) (2022)
- [Richer Convolutional Features for Edge Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.02103/) (2016)
- [Label Decoupling Framework for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.11048/) (2020)
- [Weakly-Supervised Salient Object Detection via Scribble Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07685/) (2020)
- [Deep Unsupervised Saliency Detection: A Multiple Noisy Labeling Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10910/) (2018)
- [Learning Uncertain Convolutional Features for Accurate Saliency Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.02031/) (2017)
- [Multi-source weak supervision for saliency detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00566/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Mutual Information Regularization for Weakly-supervised RGB-D Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03630/) (2023)
- [Motion Segmentation for Neuromorphic Aerial Surveillance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15209/) (2024)
- [Is It Time for the Renaissance of Salient Object Detection in the Era of MLLMs?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.29222/) (2026)
- [Unsupervised Structural Scene Decomposition via Foreground-Aware Slot Attention with Pseudo-Mask Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.02685/) (2025)
- [Can Frozen Hyperspherical Features Guide the Selection of Pseudo Masks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.30080/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present a conceptually simple self-supervised method for saliency detection. Our method generates and uses pseudo-ground truth labels for training. The generated pseudo-GT labels don't require any kind of human annotations (e.g., pixel-wise labels or weak labels like scribbles). Recent works show that features extracted from classification tasks provide important saliency cues like structure and semantic information of salient objects in the image. Our method, called 3SD, exploits this idea by adding a branch for a self-supervised classification task in parallel with salient object detection, to obtain class activation maps (CAM maps). These CAM maps along with the edges of the input image are used to generate the pseudo-GT saliency maps to train our 3SD network. Specifically, we propose a contrastive learning-based training on multiple image patches for the classification task. We show the multi-patch classification with contrastive loss improves the quality of the CAM maps compared to naive classification on the entire image. Experiments on six benchmark datasets demonstrate that without any labels, our 3SD method outperforms all existing weakly supervised and unsupervised methods, and its performance is on par with the fully-supervised methods. Code is available at :https://github.com/rajeevyasarla/3SD