# A lightweight multi-scale context network for salient object detection in optical remote sensing images

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.08959 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.08959/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 May 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [Pyramid Scene Parsing Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01105/) (2016)
- [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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Salient Object Detection in the Deep Learning Era: An In-Depth Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09146/) (2019)
- [Pyramid Feature Attention Network for Saliency detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.00179/) (2019)
- [Label Decoupling Framework for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.11048/) (2020)
- [Global Context-Aware Progressive Aggregation Network for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00651/) (2020)
- [Salient Object Detection: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.5878/) (2014)
- [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)
- [Nested Network with Two-Stream Pyramid for Salient Object Detection in Optical Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08462/) (2019)
- [RRNet: Relational Reasoning Network with Parallel Multi-scale Attention for Salient Object Detection in Optical Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14223/) (2021)
- [Saliency-Associated Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03637/) (2021)
- [Saliency Weighted Convolutional Features for Instance Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10795/) (2017)
- [Multi-scale Edge-based U-shape Network for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.09408/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [RSSOD-Bench: A large-scale benchmark dataset for Salient Object Detection in Optical Remote Sensing Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02351/) (2023)
- [Multi-level Cellular Automata for FLIM networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.11406/) (2025)
- [FLIM-based Salient Object Detection Networks with Adaptive Decoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.20872/) (2025)
- [DGSSM: Diffusion guided state-space models for multimodal salient object detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.17585/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Due to the more dramatic multi-scale variations and more complicated foregrounds and backgrounds in optical remote sensing images (RSIs), the salient object detection (SOD) for optical RSIs becomes a huge challenge. However, different from natural scene images (NSIs), the discussion on the optical RSI SOD task still remains scarce. In this paper, we propose a multi-scale context network, namely MSCNet, for SOD in optical RSIs. Specifically, a multi-scale context extraction module is adopted to address the scale variation of salient objects by effectively learning multi-scale contextual information. Meanwhile, in order to accurately detect complete salient objects in complex backgrounds, we design an attention-based pyramid feature aggregation mechanism for gradually aggregating and refining the salient regions from the multi-scale context extraction module. Extensive experiments on two benchmarks demonstrate that MSCNet achieves competitive performance with only 3.26M parameters. The code will be available at https://github.com/NuaaYH/MSCNet.