mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Unsupervised Salient Object Detection with Spectral Cluster Voting

arXiv 2203.12614 ↗First posted 23 Mar 2022cs.CVcited by 56

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Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we tackle the challenging task of unsupervised salient object detection (SOD) by leveraging spectral clustering on self-supervised features. We make the following contributions: (i) We revisit spectral clustering and demonstrate its potential to group the pixels of salient objects; (ii) Given mask proposals from multiple applications of spectral clustering on image features computed from various self-supervised models, e.g., MoCov2, SwAV, DINO, we propose a simple but effective winner-takes-all voting mechanism for selecting the salient masks, leveraging object priors based on framing and distinctiveness; (iii) Using the selected object segmentation as pseudo groundtruth masks, we train a salient object detector, dubbed SelfMask, which outperforms prior approaches on three unsupervised SOD benchmarks. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/NoelShin/selfmask.

Key facts. Cited by 56 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 40 of its 76 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 23 Mar 2022.

Builds on

40 of 76 references.

References · 40

  1. 2017Attention Is All You Needcited by 60,361
  2. 2015Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognitioncited by 52,096
  3. 2020An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scalecited by 30,186
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28 more
  1. 2021An Empirical Study of Training Self-Supervised Vision Transformerscited by 1,616
  2. 2016Unsupervised Learning of Visual Representations by Solving Jigsaw Puzzlescited by 1,382
  3. 2021Per-Pixel Classification is Not All You Need for Semantic Segmentationcited by 1,152
  4. 2021Tokens-to-Token ViT: Training Vision Transformers from Scratch on ImageNetcited by 1,101
  5. 2015Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning by Context Predictioncited by 1,066
  6. 2018Deep Clustering for Unsupervised Learning of Visual Featurescited by 1,028
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  10. 2020Unsupervised Discovery of Interpretable Directions in the GAN Latent Spacecited by 289
  11. 2019EGNet:Edge Guidance Network for Salient Object Detectioncited by 237
  12. 2021Localizing Objects with Self-Supervised Transformers and no Labelscited by 230
  13. 2019A Simple Pooling-Based Design for Real-Time Salient Object Detectioncited by 212
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  16. 2022Self-Supervised Transformers for Unsupervised Object Discovery using Normalized Cutcited by 167
  17. 2019Salient Object Detection in the Deep Learning Era: An In-Depth Surveycited by 164
  18. 2015The Fast Bilateral Solvercited by 87
  19. 2019Unsupervised Object Segmentation by Redrawingcited by 74
  20. 2019Emergence of Object Segmentation in Perturbed Generative Modelscited by 57
  21. 2020Object Segmentation Without Labels with Large-Scale Generative Modelscited by 52
  22. 2018Deep Unsupervised Saliency Detection: A Multiple Noisy Labeling Perspectivecited by 50
  23. 2021Finding an Unsupervised Image Segmenter in Each of Your Deep Generative Modelscited by 44
  24. 2015Learning visual groups from co-occurrences in space and timecited by 42
  25. 2020DEAL: Difficulty-aware Active Learning for Semantic Segmentationcited by 32
  26. 2019Object Discovery with a Copy-Pasting GANcited by 29
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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2022: 9; 2023: 23; 2024: 12; 2025: 9; 2026: 3.

56 papers.

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  1. 2022ReCo: Retrieve and Co-segment for Zero-shot Transfercited by 117
  2. 2022TokenCut: Segmenting Objects in Images and Videos with Self-supervised Transformer and Normalized Cutcited by 113
  3. 2022Unsupervised Object Localization: Observing the Background to Discover Objectscited by 66
  4. 2023Diffusion Models for Open-Vocabulary Segmentationcited by 64
  5. 2023DiffusionSeg: Adapting Diffusion Towards Unsupervised Object Discoverycited by 54
  6. 2023Advances in Deep Concealed Scene Understandingcited by 47
  7. 2024EmerDiff: Emerging Pixel-level Semantic Knowledge in Diffusion Modelscited by 43
  8. 2022Guess What Moves: Unsupervised Video and Image Segmentation by Anticipating Motioncited by 42
  9. 2022Open-vocabulary Semantic Segmentation with Frozen Vision-Language Modelscited by 39
  10. 2023CLIP-DIY: CLIP Dense Inference Yields Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation For-Freecited by 39
  11. 2024In Defense of Lazy Visual Grounding for Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentationcited by 38
  12. 2022Texture-guided Saliency Distilling for Unsupervised Salient Object Detectioncited by 24
38 more
  1. 2023u-LLaVA: Unifying Multi-Modal Tasks via Large Language Modelcited by 24
  2. 2022NamedMask: Distilling Segmenters from Complementary Foundation Modelscited by 20
  3. 2022MOVE: Unsupervised Movable Object Segmentation and Detectioncited by 20
  4. 2023Unsupervised Object Localization in the Era of Self-Supervised ViTs: A Surveycited by 16
  5. 2023Semantic Attention Flow Fields for Monocular Dynamic Scene Decompositioncited by 13
  6. 2023Visual Dependency Transformers: Dependency Tree Emerges from Reversed Attentioncited by 12
  7. 2023Weakly-supervised Contrastive Learning for Unsupervised Object Discoverycited by 12
  8. 2024CamoTeacher: Dual-Rotation Consistency Learning for Semi-Supervised Camouflaged Object Detectioncited by 12
  9. 2023Appearance-Based Refinement for Object-Centric Motion Segmentationcited by 11
  10. 2023HEAP: Unsupervised Object Discovery and Localization with Contrastive Groupingcited by 10
  11. 2024ProMerge: Prompt and Merge for Unsupervised Instance Segmentationcited by 10
  12. 2025UCOD-DPL: Unsupervised Camouflaged Object Detection via Dynamic Pseudo-label Learningcited by 10
  13. 2023LOCATE: Self-supervised Object Discovery via Flow-guided Graph-cut and Bootstrapped Self-trainingcited by 8
  14. 2023PaintSeg: Training-free Segmentation via Paintingcited by 7
  15. 2023Understanding Self-Supervised Features for Learning Unsupervised Instance Segmentationcited by 7
  16. 2023FreePoint: Unsupervised Point Cloud Instance Segmentationcited by 6
  17. 2023Learning to Count without Annotationscited by 5
  18. 2024Unified Unsupervised Salient Object Detection via Knowledge Transfercited by 5
  19. 2023Zero-shot Unsupervised Transfer Instance Segmentationcited by 4
  20. 2023Unsupervised Camouflaged Object Segmentation as Domain Adaptationcited by 4
  21. 2023SEMPART: Self-supervised Multi-resolution Partitioning of Image Semanticscited by 4
  22. 2024Unsupervised Object Discovery: A Comprehensive Survey and Unified Taxonomycited by 4
  23. 2025unMORE: Unsupervised Multi-Object Segmentation via Center-Boundary Reasoningcited by 4
  24. 2023Box-based Refinement for Weakly Supervised and Unsupervised Localization Taskscited by 3
  25. 2023Saliency Guided Contrastive Learning on Scene Imagescited by 2
  26. 2023Towards End-to-End Unsupervised Saliency Detection with Self-Supervised Top-Down Contextcited by 2
  27. 2024Unsupervised Part Discovery via Dual Representation Alignmentcited by 2
  28. 2024Seamless Detection: Unifying Salient Object Detection and Camouflaged Object Detectioncited by 2
  29. 2025FlowCut: Unsupervised Video Instance Segmentation via Temporal Mask Matchingcited by 2
  30. 2023A Visual Representation-guided Framework with Global Affinity for Weakly Supervised Salient Object Detectioncited by 1
  31. 2024Deep Spectral Improvement for Unsupervised Image Instance Segmentationcited by 1
  32. 2024Co-Segmentation without any Pixel-level Supervision with Application to Large-Scale Sketch Classificationcited by 1
  33. 2025Beyond-Labels: Advancing Open-Vocabulary Segmentation With Vision-Language Modelscited by 1
  34. 2026Learning Accurate Segmentation Purely from Self-Supervisioncited by 1
  35. 2026EReCu: Pseudo-label Evolution Fusion and Refinement with Multi-Cue Learning for Unsupervised Camouflage Detectioncited by 1
  36. 2022Learning a Fast 3D Spectral Approach to Object Segmentation and Tracking over Space and Timecited by 0
  37. 2024Discriminative Consensus Mining with A Thousand Groups for More Accurate Co-Salient Object Detectioncited by 0
  38. 2024PEEKABOO: Hiding parts of an image for unsupervised object localizationcited by 0

50 most cited of 56 All 56 (JSON)