RSSOD-Bench: A large-scale benchmark dataset for Salient Object Detection in Optical Remote Sensing Imagery

We present the RSSOD-Bench dataset for salient object detection (SOD) in optical remote sensing imagery. While SOD has achieved success in natural scene images with deep learning, research in SOD for remote sensing imagery (RSSOD) is still in its early stages. Existing RSSOD datasets have limitations in terms of scale, and scene categories, which make them misaligned with real-world applications. To address these shortcomings, we construct the RSSOD-Bench dataset, which contains images from four different cities in the USA. The dataset provides annotations for various salient object categories, such as buildings, lakes, rivers, highways, bridges, aircraft, ships, athletic fields, and more. The salient objects in RSSOD-Bench exhibit large-scale variations, cluttered backgrounds, and different seasons. Unlike existing datasets, RSSOD-Bench offers uniform distribution across scene categories. We benchmark 23 different state-of-the-art approaches from both the computer vision and remote sensing communities. Experimental results demonstrate that more research efforts are required for the RSSOD task.