# Salient Object Detection for Images Taken by People With Vision Impairments

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.05323 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.05323/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 64 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Jan 2023.

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

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [VizWiz Grand Challenge: Answering Visual Questions from Blind People](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08218/) (2018)
- [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)
- [The Secrets of Salient Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2807/) (2014)
- [F3Net: Fusion, Feedback and Focus for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11445/) (2019)
- [Visual Saliency Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.12099/) (2021)
- [Salient Object Detection via Integrity Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.07663/) (2021)
- [Salient Object Detection: A Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1501.02741/) (2015)
- [Captioning Images Taken by People Who Are Blind](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08565/) (2020)
- [Highly Accurate Dichotomous Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03041/) (2022)
- [Salient Object Detection: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.5878/) (2014)
- [Towards High-Resolution Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07274/) (2019)
- [Full-Duplex Strategy for Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03151/) (2021)
- [Pyramid Grafting Network for One-Stage High Resolution Saliency Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05041/) (2022)
- [Grounding Answers for Visual Questions Asked by Visually Impaired People](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.01993/) (2022)
- [Boundary-Aware Segmentation Network for Mobile and Web Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.04704/) (2021)
- [Revisiting Image Pyramid Structure for High Resolution Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09475/) (2022)
- [TRACER: Extreme Attention Guided Salient Object Tracing Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07380/) (2021)
- [Assessing Image Quality Issues for Real-World Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12511/) (2020)
- [Vision Skills Needed to Answer Visual Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03160/) (2020)
- [The Effect of Computer-Generated Descriptions on Photo-Sharing Experiences of People with Visual Impairments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01515/) (2018)
- [Predicting Foreground Object Ambiguity and Efficiently Crowdsourcing the Segmentation(s)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.00366/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Open Scene Understanding: Grounded Situation Recognition Meets Segment Anything for Helping People with Visual Impairments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07757/) (2023)
- [Evaluating Multimodal Language Models as Visual Assistants for Visually Impaired Users](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22610/) (2025)
- [BIV-Priv-Seg: Locating Private Content in Images Taken by People With Visual Impairments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.18243/) (2024)
- [@Bench: Benchmarking Vision-Language Models for Human-centered Assistive Technology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.14215/) (2024)
- [NaVIP: An Image-Centric Indoor Navigation Solution for Visually Impaired People](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18109/) (2024)
- [Hierarchical Instance Tracking to Balance Privacy Preservation with Accessible Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.10102/) (2025)
- [Focus Where It Counts: A Salience-Driven Vision-Language Model for Low Vision Assistance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.28218/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Salient object detection is the task of producing a binary mask for an image that deciphers which pixels belong to the foreground object versus background. We introduce a new salient object detection dataset using images taken by people who are visually impaired who were seeking to better understand their surroundings, which we call VizWiz-SalientObject. Compared to seven existing datasets, VizWiz-SalientObject is the largest (i.e., 32,000 human-annotated images) and contains unique characteristics including a higher prevalence of text in the salient objects (i.e., in 68% of images) and salient objects that occupy a larger ratio of the images (i.e., on average, ~50% coverage). We benchmarked seven modern salient object detection methods on our dataset and found they struggle most with images featuring salient objects that are large, have less complex boundaries, and lack text as well as for lower quality images. We invite the broader community to work on our new dataset challenge by publicly sharing the dataset at https://vizwiz.org/tasks-and-datasets/salient-object .