a novel attention-based network for fast salient object detection

TL;DR

This paper introduces a compact, attention-enhanced deep convolutional network for salient object detection that achieves faster convergence and comparable accuracy with significantly fewer parameters.

Contribution

The paper proposes a new deep CNN architecture with model compression, channel attention, and an adaptive optimizer to improve efficiency and accuracy in salient object detection.

Findings

Model compressed to 1/3 size without accuracy loss

Faster and smoother convergence on multiple datasets

Outperforms existing models in efficiency and speed

Abstract

In the current salient object detection network, the most popular method is using U-shape structure. However, the massive number of parameters leads to more consumption of computing and storage resources which are not feasible to deploy on the limited memory device. Some others shallow layer network will not maintain the same accuracy compared with U-shape structure and the deep network structure with more parameters will not converge to a global minimum loss with great speed. To overcome all of these disadvantages, we proposed a new deep convolution network architecture with three contributions: (1) using smaller convolution neural networks (CNNs) to compress the model in our improved salient object features compression and reinforcement extraction module (ISFCREM) to reduce parameters of the model. (2) introducing channel attention mechanism in ISFCREM to weigh different channels for improving the ability of feature representation. (3) applying a new optimizer to accumulate the long-term gradient information during training to adaptively tune the learning rate. The results demonstrate that the proposed method can compress the model to 1/3 of the original size nearly without losing the accuracy and converging faster and more smoothly on six widely used datasets of salient object detection compared with the others models. Our code is published in https://gitee.com/binzhangbinzhangbin/code-a-novel-attention-based-network-for-fast-salient-object-detection.git