# Breaking Alignment Barriers: TPS-Driven Semantic Correlation Learning for Alignment-Free RGB-T Salient Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.21856 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.21856/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 3 of its 14 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Dec 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Spatial Group-wise Enhance: Improving Semantic Feature Learning in Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.09646/) (2019)
- [Alignment-Free RGBT Salient Object Detection: Semantics-guided Asymmetric Correlation Network and A Unified Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00917/) (2024)
- [Alignment-Free RGB-T Salient Object Detection: A Large-scale Dataset and Progressive Correlation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14576/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [S2A:Semantic-to-Spatial Alignment for Alignment-Free RGB-T Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.27413/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Existing RGB-T salient object detection methods predominantly rely on manually aligned and annotated datasets, struggling to handle real-world scenarios with raw, unaligned RGB-T image pairs. In practical applications, due to significant cross-modal disparities such as spatial misalignment, scale variations, and viewpoint shifts, the performance of current methods drastically deteriorates on unaligned datasets. To address this issue, we propose an efficient RGB-T SOD method for real-world unaligned image pairs, termed Thin-Plate Spline-driven Semantic Correlation Learning Network (TPS-SCL). We employ a dual-stream MobileViT as the encoder, combined with efficient Mamba scanning mechanisms, to effectively model correlations between the two modalities while maintaining low parameter counts and computational overhead. To suppress interference from redundant background information during alignment, we design a Semantic Correlation Constraint Module (SCCM) to hierarchically constrain salient features. Furthermore, we introduce a Thin-Plate Spline Alignment Module (TPSAM) to mitigate spatial discrepancies between modalities. Additionally, a Cross-Modal Correlation Module (CMCM) is incorporated to fully explore and integrate inter-modal dependencies, enhancing detection performance. Extensive experiments on various datasets demonstrate that TPS-SCL attains state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance among existing lightweight SOD methods and outperforms mainstream RGB-T SOD approaches.