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Most salient object detection approaches use U-Net or feature pyramid networks (FPN) as their basic structures. These methods ignore two key problems when the encoder exchanges information with the decoder: one is the lack of interference control between them, the other is without considering the disparity of the contributions of different encoder blocks. In this work, we propose a simple gated network (GateNet) to solve both issues at once. With the help of multilevel gate units, the valuable context information from the encoder can be optimally transmitted to the decoder. We design a novel gated dual branch structure to build the cooperation among different levels of features and improve the discriminability of the whole network. Through the dual branch design, more details of the saliency map can be further restored. In addition, we adopt the atrous spatial pyramid pooling based on the proposed "Fold" operation (Fold-ASPP) to accurately localize salient objects of various scales. Extensive experiments on five challenging datasets demonstrate that the proposed model performs favorably against most state-of-the-art methods under different evaluation metrics.

Existing RGB-D salient object detection (SOD) approaches concentrate on the cross-modal fusion between the RGB stream and the depth stream. They do not deeply explore the effect of the depth map itself. In this work, we design a single stream network to directly use the depth map to guide early fusion and middle fusion between RGB and depth, which saves the feature encoder of the depth stream and achieves a lightweight and real-time model. We tactfully utilize depth information from two perspectives: (1) Overcoming the incompatibility problem caused by the great difference between modalities, we build a single stream encoder to achieve the early fusion, which can take full advantage of ImageNet pre-trained backbone model to extract rich and discriminative features. (2) We design a novel depth-enhanced dual attention module (DEDA) to efficiently provide the fore-/back-ground branches with the spatially filtered features, which enables the decoder to optimally perform the middle fusion. Besides, we put forward a pyramidally attended feature extraction module (PAFE) to accurately localize the objects of different scales. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed model performs favorably against most state-of-the-art methods under different evaluation metrics. Furthermore, this model is 55.5% lighter than the current lightest model and runs at a real-time speed of 32 FPS when processing a 384 × 384 image.

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Recent camouflaged object detection (COD) attempts to segment objects visually blended into their surroundings, which is extremely complex and difficult in real-world scenarios. Apart from the high intrinsic similarity between camouflaged objects and their background, objects are usually diverse in scale, fuzzy in appearance, and even severely occluded. To this end, we propose an effective unified collaborative pyramid network which mimics human behavior when observing vague images and videos, i.e., zooming in and out. Specifically, our approach employs the zooming strategy to learn discriminative mixed-scale semantics by the multi-head scale integration and rich granularity perception units, which are designed to fully explore imperceptible clues between candidate objects and background surroundings. The former's intrinsic multi-head aggregation provides more diverse visual patterns. The latter's routing mechanism can effectively propagate inter-frame difference in spatiotemporal scenarios and adaptively ignore static representations. They provides a solid foundation for realizing a unified architecture for static and dynamic COD. Moreover, considering the uncertainty and ambiguity derived from indistinguishable textures, we construct a simple yet effective regularization, uncertainty awareness loss, to encourage predictions with higher confidence in candidate regions. Our highly task-friendly framework consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in image and video COD benchmarks. The code will be available at https://github.com/lartpang/ZoomNeXt.