# Divide-and-Conquer: Confluent Triple-Flow Network for RGB-T Salient Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.01556 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01556/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 2 of its 81 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Dec 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [RGBT Salient Object Detection: A Large-scale Dataset and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.03262/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

RGB-Thermal Salient Object Detection aims to pinpoint prominent objects within aligned pairs of visible and thermal infrared images. Traditional encoder-decoder architectures, while designed for cross-modality feature interactions, may not have adequately considered the robustness against noise originating from defective modalities. Inspired by hierarchical human visual systems, we propose the ConTriNet, a robust Confluent Triple-Flow Network employing a Divide-and-Conquer strategy. Specifically, ConTriNet comprises three flows: two modality-specific flows explore cues from RGB and Thermal modalities, and a third modality-complementary flow integrates cues from both modalities. ConTriNet presents several notable advantages. It incorporates a Modality-induced Feature Modulator in the modality-shared union encoder to minimize inter-modality discrepancies and mitigate the impact of defective samples. Additionally, a foundational Residual Atrous Spatial Pyramid Module in the separated flows enlarges the receptive field, allowing for the capture of multi-scale contextual information. Furthermore, a Modality-aware Dynamic Aggregation Module in the modality-complementary flow dynamically aggregates saliency-related cues from both modality-specific flows. Leveraging the proposed parallel triple-flow framework, we further refine saliency maps derived from different flows through a flow-cooperative fusion strategy, yielding a high-quality, full-resolution saliency map for the final prediction. To evaluate the robustness and stability of our approach, we collect a comprehensive RGB-T SOD benchmark, VT-IMAG, covering various real-world challenging scenarios. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks and our VT-IMAG dataset demonstrate that ConTriNet consistently outperforms state-of-the-art competitors in both common and challenging scenarios.