Memory-Efficient Deep Salient Object Segmentation Networks on Gridized Superpixels

Computer vision algorithms with pixel-wise labeling tasks, such as semantic segmentation and salient object detection, have gone through a significant accuracy increase with the incorporation of deep learning. Deep segmentation methods slightly modify and fine-tune pre-trained networks that have hundreds of millions of parameters. In this work, we question the need of having such memory demanding networks for a reasonable performance in salient object segmentation. To this end, we propose a way to learn a memory-efficient network from scratch by training it only on salient object detection datasets. Our method encodes images to gridized superpixels that preserve both the object boundaries and the connectivity rules of regular pixels. This representation allows us to use convolutional neural networks that operate on regular grids. By using these encoded images, we train a memory-efficient network using only 0.048% of the number of parameters that a majority of other deep salient object detection networks have. Our method shows comparable accuracy with the state-of-the-art deep salient object detection methods and provides a much more memory-efficient alternative to them. Due to its easy deployment and small size, such a network is preferable for applications in memory limited IoT devices.