Global Context Encoding for Salient Objects Detection

Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have gained their reputation for the success in various tasks in computer vision, including salient objects detection. However, it remains a challenge that the CNNs have repeated downsample operators and always create low-resolution predictions, which tend to loss details and finer structure of images. To detect and segment the salient objects well, it is also necessary to merge high-level semantic information and low-level fine details simultaneously. Thus, we propose a novel network structure with stage-wise refinement sub-structures. In addition, we exploit the essence of salient objects detection by encoding the global image context in a specifically designed module, which is applied to every stage of the refinement structure. So the coarse saliency map generated from the base CNN can be refined with low-level feature and global context information step-by-step. Experimental results have demonstrated that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches on four benchmark datasets.