Shallow and deep convolutional networks for saliency prediction

The prediction of salient areas in images has been traditionally addressed with hand-crafted features based on neuroscience principles. This paper, however, addresses the problem with a completely data-driven approach by training a convolutional neural network (convnet). The learning process is formulated as a minimization of a loss function that measures the Euclidean distance of the predicted saliency map with the provided ground truth. The recent publication of large datasets of saliency prediction has provided enough data to train end-to-end architectures that are both fast and accurate. Two designs are proposed: a shallow convnet trained from scratch, and a another deeper solution whose first three layers are adapted from another network trained for classification. To the authors knowledge, these are the first end-to-end CNNs trained and tested for the purpose of saliency prediction

A Dilated Inception Network for Visual Saliency Prediction

Recently, with the advent of deep convolutional neural networks (DCNN), the improvements in visual saliency prediction research are impressive. One possible direction to approach the next improvement is to fully characterize the multi-scale saliency-influential factors with a computationally-friendly module in DCNN architectures. In this work, we proposed an end-to-end dilated inception network (DINet) for visual saliency prediction. It captures multi-scale contextual features effectively with very limited extra parameters. Instead of utilizing parallel standard convolutions with different kernel sizes as the existing inception module, our proposed dilated inception module (DIM) uses parallel dilated convolutions with different dilation rates which can significantly reduce the computation load while enriching the diversity of receptive fields in feature maps. Moreover, the performance of our saliency model is further improved by using a set of linear normalization-based probability distribution distance metrics as loss functions. As such, we can formulate saliency prediction as a probability distribution prediction task for global saliency inference instead of a typical pixel-wise regression problem. Experimental results on several challenging saliency benchmark datasets demonstrate that our DINet with proposed loss functions can achieve state-of-the-art performance with shorter inference time.Comment: Accepted by IEEE Transactions on Multimedia. The source codes are available at https://github.com/ysyscool/DINe