# Alignment-Free RGBT Salient Object Detection: Semantics-guided Asymmetric Correlation Network and A Unified Benchmark

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.00917 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00917/

## Key facts

- Cited by 19 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 93 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Jun 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [V-Net: Fully Convolutional Neural Networks for Volumetric Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04797/) (2016)
- [Deformable Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06211/) (2017)
- [Rethinking Semantic Segmentation from a Sequence-to-Sequence Perspective with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15840/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Monocular Depth Estimation with Left-Right Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.03677/) (2016)
- [Transformer Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15436/) (2021)
- [Cascaded Partial Decoder for Fast and Accurate Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08739/) (2019)
- [The Secrets of Salient Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2807/) (2014)
- [Visual Saliency Based on Multiscale Deep Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.08663/) (2015)
- [Visual Saliency Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.12099/) (2021)
- [Salient Object Detection in the Deep Learning Era: An In-Depth Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09146/) (2019)
- [Rethinking RGB-D Salient Object Detection: Models, Data Sets, and Large-Scale Benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.06781/) (2019)
- [Salient Object Detection via Integrity Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.07663/) (2021)
- [Cross-Modal Implicit Relation Reasoning and Aligning for Text-to-Image Person Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12501/) (2023)
- [RGB-D Salient Object Detection: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.00230/) (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)
- [EDN: Salient Object Detection via Extremely-Downsampled Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.13093/) (2020)
- [SwinNet: Swin Transformer drives edge-aware RGB-D and RGB-T salient object detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05585/) (2022)
- [RGB-T Image Saliency Detection via Collaborative Graph Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.06741/) (2019)
- [Deep RGB-D Saliency Detection with Depth-Sensitive Attention and Automatic Multi-Modal Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11832/) (2021)
- [A Unified RGB-T Saliency Detection Benchmark: Dataset, Baselines, Analysis and A Novel Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.02829/) (2017)
- [CAVER: Cross-Modal View-Mixed Transformer for Bi-Modal Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02363/) (2021)
- [RGBD Salient Object Detection via Deep Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.03333/) (2016)
- [Multi-interactive Dual-decoder for RGB-thermal Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.02315/) (2020)
- [Learning Selective Mutual Attention and Contrast for RGB-D Saliency Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05537/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [IRGPT: Understanding Real-world Infrared Image with Bi-cross-modal Curriculum on Large-scale Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.14449/) (2025)
- [WXSOD: A Benchmark for Robust Salient Object Detection in Adverse Weather Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.12250/) (2025)
- [SAMSOD: Rethinking SAM Optimization for RGB-T Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.03689/) (2025)
- [Boosting Segment Anything Model to Generalize Visually Non-Salient Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.00537/) (2026)
- [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)
- [IV-tuning: Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for Infrared-Visible Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16654/) (2024)
- [Decoupled Cross-Modal Alignment Network for Text-RGBT Person Retrieval and A High-Quality Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07950/) (2025)
- [Multi-Order Matching Network for Alignment-Free Depth Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16361/) (2025)
- [Breaking Alignment Barriers: TPS-Driven Semantic Correlation Learning for Alignment-Free RGB-T Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.21856/) (2025)
- [Multimodal Spatio-temporal Graph Learning for Alignment-free RGBT Video Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.11779/) (2025)
- [Salient Object Detection in Complex Weather Conditions via Noise Indicators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.10592/) (2025)
- [Modality-Agnostic Prompt Learning for Multi-Modal Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.12380/) (2026)
- [RACANet: Reliability-Aware Crowd Anchor Network for RGB-T Crowd Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.24543/) (2026)
- [Rethinking Conditional Generation for Underwater Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.01825/) (2026)
- [Spectral-Spatial Synergistic Guided Network for Hyperspectral Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.21032/) (2026)
- [S3AM: A Single-Stream SAM with Reliability-Calibrated Frequency Adapter for Multi-modal Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.17475/) (2026)
- [S2A:Semantic-to-Spatial Alignment for Alignment-Free RGB-T Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.27413/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

RGB and Thermal (RGBT) Salient Object Detection (SOD) aims to achieve high-quality saliency prediction by exploiting the complementary information of visible and thermal image pairs, which are initially captured in an unaligned manner. However, existing methods are tailored for manually aligned image pairs, which are labor-intensive, and directly applying these methods to original unaligned image pairs could significantly degrade their performance. In this paper, we make the first attempt to address RGBT SOD for initially captured RGB and thermal image pairs without manual alignment. Specifically, we propose a Semantics-guided Asymmetric Correlation Network (SACNet) that consists of two novel components: 1) an asymmetric correlation module utilizing semantics-guided attention to model cross-modal correlations specific to unaligned salient regions; 2) an associated feature sampling module to sample relevant thermal features according to the corresponding RGB features for multi-modal feature integration. In addition, we construct a unified benchmark dataset called UVT2000, containing 2000 RGB and thermal image pairs directly captured from various real-world scenes without any alignment, to facilitate research on alignment-free RGBT SOD. Extensive experiments on both aligned and unaligned datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superior performance of our method. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/Angknpng/SACNet.