# A Weakly Supervised Learning Framework for Salient Object Detection via Hybrid Labels

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.02957 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.02957/

## Key facts

- Cited by 20 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 55 of its 104 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Sep 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 55)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [Show, Attend and Tell: Neural Image Caption Generation with Visual Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03044/) (2015)
- [Structure-measure: A New Way to Evaluate Foreground Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.00786/) (2017)
- [SiamRPN++: Evolution of Siamese Visual Tracking with Very Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.11703/) (2018)
- [EGNet:Edge Guidance Network for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08297/) (2019)
- [Cascaded Partial Decoder for Fast and Accurate Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08739/) (2019)
- [Multi-scale Interactive Network for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09062/) (2020)
- [The Secrets of Salient Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2807/) (2014)
- [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)
- [Pyramid Feature Attention Network for Saliency detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.00179/) (2019)
- [Suppress and Balance: A Simple Gated Network for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08074/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Deep Reinforcement Learning for Unsupervised Video Summarization with Diversity-Representativeness Reward](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.00054/) (2017)
- [Weakly-Supervised Salient Object Detection via Scribble Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07685/) (2020)
- [Amulet: Aggregating Multi-level Convolutional Features for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.02001/) (2017)
- [Reliability Does Matter: An End-to-End Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08039/) (2019)
- [JL-DCF: Joint Learning and Densely-Cooperative Fusion Framework for RGB-D Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.08515/) (2020)
- [Dense Attention Fluid Network for Salient Object Detection in Optical Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13144/) (2020)
- [Towards Fast and Accurate Real-World Depth Super-Resolution: Benchmark Dataset and Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06174/) (2021)
- [Review of Visual Saliency Detection with Comprehensive Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.03391/) (2018)
- [Structure-Consistent Weakly Supervised Salient Object Detection with Local Saliency Coherence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.04404/) (2020)
- [Nested Network with Two-Stream Pyramid for Salient Object Detection in Optical Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08462/) (2019)
- [Deep Unsupervised Saliency Detection: A Multiple Noisy Labeling Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10910/) (2018)
- [Affinity Attention Graph Neural Network for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04054/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [PUGAN: Physical Model-Guided Underwater Image Enhancement Using GAN with Dual-Discriminators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08918/) (2023)
- [Seg-R1: Segmentation Can Be Surprisingly Simple with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.22624/) (2025)
- [CIR-Net: Cross-modality Interaction and Refinement for RGB-D Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02843/) (2022)
- [Does Thermal Really Always Matter for RGB-T Salient Object Detection?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04266/) (2022)
- [Frequency Perception Network for Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08924/) (2023)
- [Point-aware Interaction and CNN-induced Refinement Network for RGB-D Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08930/) (2023)
- [Learning Adaptive Fusion Bank for Multi-modal Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01127/) (2024)
- [A Comprehensive Survey of Convolutions in Deep Learning: Applications, Challenges, and Future Trends](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15490/) (2024)
- [Multi-Projection Fusion and Refinement Network for Salient Object Detection in 360deg Omnidirectional Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.12378/) (2022)
- [PSNet: Parallel Symmetric Network for Video Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05912/) (2022)
- [SDDNet: Style-guided Dual-layer Disentanglement Network for Shadow Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08935/) (2023)
- [SSFam: Scribble Supervised Salient Object Detection Family](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.04817/) (2024)
- [Rethinking Lightweight Salient Object Detection via Network Depth-Width Tradeoff](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.06679/) (2023)
- [From Sight to Insight: Unleashing Eye-Tracking in Weakly Supervised Video Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23519/) (2025)
- [Feedback Chain Network For Hippocampus Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.07891/) (2022)
- [A Visual Representation-guided Framework with Global Affinity for Weakly Supervised Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.10697/) (2023)
- [Learning Hierarchical Color Guidance for Depth Map Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07290/) (2024)
- [Towards Imbalanced Motion: Part-Decoupling Network for Video Portrait Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16565/) (2023)
- [Rotation center identification based on geometric relationships for rotary motion deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.04171/) (2024)
- [GFSR-Net: Guided Focus via Segment-Wise Relevance Network for Interpretable Deep Learning in Medical Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.01919/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Fully-supervised salient object detection (SOD) methods have made great progress, but such methods often rely on a large number of pixel-level annotations, which are time-consuming and labour-intensive. In this paper, we focus on a new weakly-supervised SOD task under hybrid labels, where the supervision labels include a large number of coarse labels generated by the traditional unsupervised method and a small number of real labels. To address the issues of label noise and quantity imbalance in this task, we design a new pipeline framework with three sophisticated training strategies. In terms of model framework, we decouple the task into label refinement sub-task and salient object detection sub-task, which cooperate with each other and train alternately. Specifically, the R-Net is designed as a two-stream encoder-decoder model equipped with Blender with Guidance and Aggregation Mechanisms (BGA), aiming to rectify the coarse labels for more reliable pseudo-labels, while the S-Net is a replaceable SOD network supervised by the pseudo labels generated by the current R-Net. Note that, we only need to use the trained S-Net for testing. Moreover, in order to guarantee the effectiveness and efficiency of network training, we design three training strategies, including alternate iteration mechanism, group-wise incremental mechanism, and credibility verification mechanism. Experiments on five SOD benchmarks show that our method achieves competitive performance against weakly-supervised/unsupervised methods both qualitatively and quantitatively.