# Does Thermal Really Always Matter for RGB-T Salient Object Detection?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.04266 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04266/

## Key facts

- Cited by 37 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 53 of its 95 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Oct 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 53)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [Zero-Reference Deep Curve Estimation for Low-Light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06826/) (2020)
- [Structure-measure: A New Way to Evaluate Foreground Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.00786/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Cascaded Partial Decoder for Fast and Accurate Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08739/) (2019)
- [Deeply supervised salient object detection with short connections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.04849/) (2016)
- [Underwater Image Enhancement via Medium Transmission-Guided Multi-Color Space Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13015/) (2021)
- [Rethinking RGB-D Salient Object Detection: Models, Data Sets, and Large-Scale Benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.06781/) (2019)
- [Global Context-Aware Progressive Aggregation Network for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00651/) (2020)
- [JL-DCF: Joint Learning and Densely-Cooperative Fusion Framework for RGB-D Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.08515/) (2020)
- [RGB-D Salient Object Detection: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.00230/) (2020)
- [Hierarchical Dynamic Filtering Network for RGB-D Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.06227/) (2020)
- [Specificity-preserving RGB-D Saliency Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08162/) (2021)
- [RGBT Salient Object Detection: A Large-scale Dataset and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.03262/) (2020)
- [Siamese Network for RGB-D Salient Object Detection and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.12134/) (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)
- [RGB-T Image Saliency Detection via Collaborative Graph Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.06741/) (2019)
- [A Unified RGB-T Saliency Detection Benchmark: Dataset, Baselines, Analysis and A Novel Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.02829/) (2017)
- [Nested Network with Two-Stream Pyramid for Salient Object Detection in Optical Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08462/) (2019)
- [RGB-D Salient Object Detection with Cross-Modality Modulation and Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.07051/) (2020)
- [DPANet: Depth Potentiality-Aware Gated Attention Network for RGB-D Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08608/) (2020)
- [Multi-interactive Dual-decoder for RGB-thermal Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.02315/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [VSCode: General Visual Salient and Camouflaged Object Detection with 2D Prompt Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15011/) (2023)
- [PUGAN: Physical Model-Guided Underwater Image Enhancement Using GAN with Dual-Discriminators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08918/) (2023)
- [Advances in Deep Concealed Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11234/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Alignment-Free RGBT Salient Object Detection: Semantics-guided Asymmetric Correlation Network and A Unified Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00917/) (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)
- [Object Segmentation by Mining Cross-Modal Semantics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10469/) (2023)
- [Query-guided Prototype Evolution Network for Few-Shot Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06488/) (2024)
- [SDDNet: Style-guided Dual-layer Disentanglement Network for Shadow Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08935/) (2023)
- [Residual Spatial Fusion Network for RGB-Thermal Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.10364/) (2023)
- [Spectrum-driven Mixed-frequency Network for Hyperspectral Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.01060/) (2023)
- [Scribble-Supervised RGB-T Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09733/) (2023)
- [CFMW: Cross-modality Fusion Mamba for Robust Object Detection under Adverse Weather](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16302/) (2024)
- [SSFam: Scribble Supervised Salient Object Detection Family](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.04817/) (2024)
- [KAN-SAM: Kolmogorov-Arnold Network Guided Segment Anything Model for RGB-T Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05878/) (2025)
- [WXSOD: A Benchmark for Robust Salient Object Detection in Adverse Weather Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.12250/) (2025)
- [All in One: RGB, RGB-D, and RGB-T Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.14746/) (2023)
- [CoLA: Conditional Dropout and Language-driven Robust Dual-modal Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06780/) (2024)
- [SAMSOD: Rethinking SAM Optimization for RGB-T Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.03689/) (2025)
- [Salient Object Detection From Arbitrary Modalities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.03352/) (2024)
- [Deep Fourier-embedded Network for RGB and Thermal Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18409/) (2024)
- [HyPSAM: Hybrid Prompt-driven Segment Anything Model for RGB-Thermal Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18738/) (2025)
- [RA-SOD: Reliability-Aware RGB-T Salient Object Detection under Modality Degradation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.12622/) (2026)
- [Feedback Chain Network For Hippocampus Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.07891/) (2022)
- [LF Tracy: A Unified Single-Pipeline Approach for Salient Object Detection in Light Field Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16712/) (2024)
- [Learning Hierarchical Color Guidance for Depth Map Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07290/) (2024)
- [Efficient Fourier Filtering Network with Contrastive Learning for AAV-based Unaligned Bimodal Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.03728/) (2024)
- [RXFOOD: Plug-in RGB-X Fusion for Object of Interest Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.12621/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In recent years, RGB-T salient object detection (SOD) has attracted continuous attention, which makes it possible to identify salient objects in environments such as low light by introducing thermal image. However, most of the existing RGB-T SOD models focus on how to perform cross-modality feature fusion, ignoring whether thermal image is really always matter in SOD task. Starting from the definition and nature of this task, this paper rethinks the connotation of thermal modality, and proposes a network named TNet to solve the RGB-T SOD task. In this paper, we introduce a global illumination estimation module to predict the global illuminance score of the image, so as to regulate the role played by the two modalities. In addition, considering the role of thermal modality, we set up different cross-modality interaction mechanisms in the encoding phase and the decoding phase. On the one hand, we introduce a semantic constraint provider to enrich the semantics of thermal images in the encoding phase, which makes thermal modality more suitable for the SOD task. On the other hand, we introduce a two-stage localization and complementation module in the decoding phase to transfer object localization cue and internal integrity cue in thermal features to the RGB modality. Extensive experiments on three datasets show that the proposed TNet achieves competitive performance compared with 20 state-of-the-art methods.