# Learning Spatially Adaptive Structural Coordination for Underwater Salient Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15535 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.15535/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 46 of its 95 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [Swin Transformer V2: Scaling Up Capacity and Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09883/) (2021)
- [PVT v2: Improved Baselines with Pyramid Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13797/) (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)
- [EGNet:Edge Guidance Network for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08297/) (2019)
- [Multi-scale Interactive Network for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09062/) (2020)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Label Decoupling Framework for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.11048/) (2020)
- [UC-Net: Uncertainty Inspired RGB-D Saliency Detection via Conditional Variational Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05763/) (2020)
- [JL-DCF: Joint Learning and Densely-Cooperative Fusion Framework for RGB-D Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.08515/) (2020)
- [Specificity-preserving RGB-D Saliency Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08162/) (2021)
- [A Single Stream Network for Robust and Real-time RGB-D Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.06811/) (2020)
- [EDN: Salient Object Detection via Extremely-Downsampled Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.13093/) (2020)
- [VSCode: General Visual Salient and Camouflaged Object Detection with 2D Prompt Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15011/) (2023)
- [Accurate RGB-D Salient Object Detection via Collaborative Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11782/) (2020)
- [Selectivity or Invariance: Boundary-aware Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.10066/) (2018)
- [TriTransNet: RGB-D Salient Object Detection with a Triplet Transformer Embedding Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03990/) (2021)
- [Learning Selective Mutual Attention and Contrast for RGB-D Saliency Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05537/) (2020)
- [CIR-Net: Cross-modality Interaction and Refinement for RGB-D Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02843/) (2022)
- [Progressive Feature Polishing Network for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05942/) (2019)
- [Cross-modality Discrepant Interaction Network for RGB-D Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01971/) (2021)
- [HiDAnet: RGB-D Salient Object Detection via Hierarchical Depth Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.07405/) (2023)
- [VST++: Efficient and Stronger Visual Saliency Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11725/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Underwater salient object detection (USOD) has attracted increasing attention for underwater scene understanding and vision-guided robotic applications. However, the spatially non-uniform degradation in underwater images causes spatially varying reliability of structural cues: boundary-sensitive responses can enhance object contours but are vulnerable to degradation-induced noise, whereas region-coherent responses improve semantic completeness but may blur object boundaries. Existing methods rarely explicitly consider the spatial variation in structural cue reliability under underwater image degradation. To address this problem, this work proposes SASC-USOD, a novel framework for learning spatially adaptive structural coordination in USOD. The proposed framework constructs two complementary structural representations with different characteristics. A boundary-sensitive representation is obtained by combining fixed Laplacian filtering with a learnable local-detail transformation to enhance discriminative boundary information, while a region-coherent representation is generated through dual-range anisotropic large-kernel contextual aggregation to capture long-range structural consistency. A spatial coordination module is then introduced to estimate the relative reliability of these structural representations and adaptively coordinate their contributions according to image content. Extensive experiments on the USOD10K and USOD benchmarks demonstrate that SASC-USOD consistently outperforms existing methods, reducing MAE by 4.07% and 23.53% compared with the strongest competing method, respectively. Moreover, its lightweight variant runs at 21 FPS on an NVIDIA Jetson TX2 NX, demonstrating its capability for onboard underwater robotic perception.