# STENet: Superpixel Token Enhancing Network for RGB-D Salient Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.21999 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.21999/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 76 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Structure-measure: A New Way to Evaluate Foreground Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.00786/) (2017)
- [Enhanced-alignment Measure for Binary Foreground Map Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.10421/) (2018)
- [CMX: Cross-Modal Fusion for RGB-X Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04838/) (2022)
- [Rethinking RGB-D Salient Object Detection: Models, Data Sets, and Large-Scale Benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.06781/) (2019)
- [CAT: Cross Attention in Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05786/) (2021)
- [Superpixel Sampling Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10174/) (2018)
- [Hierarchical Dynamic Filtering Network for RGB-D Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.06227/) (2020)
- [A Single Stream Network for Robust and Real-time RGB-D Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.06811/) (2020)
- [Siamese Network for RGB-D Salient Object Detection and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.12134/) (2020)
- [Lite Vision Transformer with Enhanced Self-Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10809/) (2021)
- [SwinNet: Swin Transformer drives edge-aware RGB-D and RGB-T salient object detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05585/) (2022)
- [Deep RGB-D Saliency Detection with Depth-Sensitive Attention and Automatic Multi-Modal Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11832/) (2021)
- [CAVER: Cross-Modal View-Mixed Transformer for Bi-Modal Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02363/) (2021)
- [TriTransNet: RGB-D Salient Object Detection with a Triplet Transformer Embedding Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03990/) (2021)
- [Vision Transformer with Super Token Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11167/) (2022)
- [CIR-Net: Cross-modality Interaction and Refinement for RGB-D Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02843/) (2022)
- [RGB-D Salient Object Detection via 3D Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10241/) (2021)
- [Bilateral Attention Network for RGB-D Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14582/) (2020)
- [Depth Quality-Inspired Feature Manipulation for Efficient RGB-D Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.01779/) (2021)
- [HiDAnet: RGB-D Salient Object Detection via Hierarchical Depth Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.07405/) (2023)
- [Adaptive Fusion for RGB-D Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.01369/) (2019)
- [HRTransNet: HRFormer-Driven Two-Modality Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.03036/) (2023)
- [Point-aware Interaction and CNN-induced Refinement Network for RGB-D Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08930/) (2023)
- [Learning Adaptive Fusion Bank for Multi-modal Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01127/) (2024)
- [Salient Object Detection in Optical Remote Sensing Images Driven by Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.08206/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [IPDiff: Diffusion-driven ORSI Salient Object Detection with Information Reconstruction and Multi-Prior Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.03696/) (2026)
- [Weakly-Supervised RGB-D Salient Object Detection via SAM-driven Pseudo Annotation and State Space Interaction-based Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.15041/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Transformer-based methods for RGB-D Salient Object Detection (SOD) have gained significant interest, owing to the transformer's exceptional capacity to capture long-range pixel dependencies. Nevertheless, current RGB-D SOD methods face challenges, such as the quadratic complexity of the attention mechanism and the limited local detail extraction. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel Superpixel Token Enhancing Network (STENet), which introduces superpixels into cross-modal interaction. STENet follows the two-stream encoder-decoder structure. Its cores are two tailored superpixel-driven cross-modal interaction modules, responsible for global and local feature enhancement. Specifically, we update the superpixel generation method by expanding the neighborhood range of each superpixel, allowing for flexible transformation between pixels and superpixels. With the updated superpixel generation method, we first propose the Superpixel Attention Global Enhancing Module to model the global pixel-to-superpixel relationship rather than the traditional global pixel-to-pixel relationship, which can capture region-level information and reduce computational complexity. We also propose the Superpixel Attention Local Refining Module, which leverages pixel similarity within superpixels to filter out a subset of pixels (i.e., local pixels) and then performs feature enhancement on these local pixels, thereby capturing concerned local details. Furthermore, we fuse the globally and locally enhanced features along with the cross-scale features to achieve comprehensive feature representation. Experiments on seven RGB-D SOD datasets reveal that our STENet achieves competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art methods. The code and results of our method are available at https://github.com/Mark9010/STENet.