Active Perception Network for Salient Object Detection

Abstract

To get better saliency maps for salient object detection, recent methods fuse features from different levels of convolutional neural networks and have achieved remarkable progress. However, the differences between different feature levels bring difficulties to the fusion process, thus it may lead to unsatisfactory saliency predictions. To address this issue, we propose Active Perception Network (APN) to enhance inter-feature consistency for salient object detection. First, Mutual Projection Module (MPM) is developed to fuse different features, which uses high-level features as guided information to extract complementary components from low-level features, and can suppress background noises and improve semantic consistency. Self Projection Module (SPM) is designed to further refine the fused features, which can be considered as the extended version of residual connection. Features that pass through SPM can produce more accurate saliency maps. Finally, we propose Head Projection Module (HPM) to aggregate global information, which brings strong semantic consistency to the whole network. Comprehensive experiments on five benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches on different evaluation metrics.