A Deeper Look at Salient Object Detection: Bi-stream Network with a Small Training Dataset

Abstract

Compared with the conventional hand-crafted approaches, the deep learning based methods have achieved tremendous performance improvements by training exquisitely crafted fancy networks over large-scale training sets. However, do we really need large-scale training set for salient object detection (SOD)? In this paper, we provide a deeper insight into the interrelationship between the SOD performances and the training sets. To alleviate the conventional demands for large-scale training data, we provide a feasible way to construct a novel small-scale training set, which only contains 4K images. Moreover, we propose a novel bi-stream network to take full advantage of our proposed small training set, which is consisted of two feature backbones with different structures, achieving complementary semantical saliency fusion via the proposed gate control unit. To our best knowledge, this is the first attempt to use a small-scale training set to outperform state-of-the-art models which are trained on large-scale training sets; nevertheless, our method can still achieve the leading state-of-the-art performance on five benchmark datasets.