# DC-Net: Divide-and-Conquer for Salient Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.14955 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14955/

## Key facts

- Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 46 of its 82 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Holistically-Nested Edge Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.06375/) (2015)
- [Understanding the Effective Receptive Field in Deep Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.04128/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Cascaded Partial Decoder for Fast and Accurate Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08739/) (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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Suppress and Balance: A Simple Gated Network for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08074/) (2020)
- [Reverse Attention for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.09940/) (2018)
- [CascadePSP: Toward Class-Agnostic and Very High-Resolution Segmentation via Global and Local Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.02551/) (2020)
- [Label Decoupling Framework for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.11048/) (2020)
- [Highly Accurate Dichotomous Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03041/) (2022)
- [Global Context-Aware Progressive Aggregation Network for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00651/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Unified-modal Salient Object Detection via Adaptive Prompt Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16835/) (2023)
- [WXSOD: A Benchmark for Robust Salient Object Detection in Adverse Weather Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.12250/) (2025)
- [HVPNet: A Bio-Inspired Network for General Salient and Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.31496/) (2026)
- [Salient Object Detection in Traffic Scene through the TSOD10K Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16910/) (2025)
- [Infrared-Assisted Single-Stage Framework for Joint Restoration and Fusion of Visible and Infrared Images under Hazy Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.12586/) (2024)
- [Towards Size-invariant Salient Object Detection: A Generic Evaluation and Optimization Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.15573/) (2025)
- [DualGazeNet: A Biologically Inspired Dual-Gaze Query Network for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18865/) (2025)
- [Salient Object Detection in Complex Weather Conditions via Noise Indicators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.10592/) (2025)
- [G2HFNet: GeoGran-Aware Hierarchical Feature Fusion Network for Salient Object Detection in Optical Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.12680/) (2026)
- [IP-SAM: Rethinking Prompt-Conditioned Segmentation for Prompt-Absent Deployment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.27250/) (2026)
- [UniV2D: Bridging Visual Restoration and Semantic Perception for Underwater Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.07146/) (2026)
- [Rethinking Conditional Generation for Underwater Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.01825/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we introduce Divide-and-Conquer into the salient object detection (SOD) task to enable the model to learn prior knowledge that is for predicting the saliency map. We design a novel network, Divide-and-Conquer Network (DC-Net) which uses two encoders to solve different subtasks that are conducive to predicting the final saliency map, here is to predict the edge maps with width 4 and location maps of salient objects and then aggregate the feature maps with different semantic information into the decoder to predict the final saliency map. The decoder of DC-Net consists of our newly designed two-level Residual nested-ASPP (ResASPP2) modules, which have the ability to capture a large number of different scale features with a small number of convolution operations and have the advantages of maintaining high resolution all the time and being able to obtain a large and compact effective receptive field (ERF). Based on the advantage of Divide-and-Conquer's parallel computing, we use Parallel Acceleration to speed up DC-Net, allowing it to achieve competitive performance on six LR-SOD and five HR-SOD datasets under high efficiency (60 FPS and 55 FPS). Codes and results are available: https://github.com/PiggyJerry/DC-Net.