DualGazeNet: A Biologically Inspired Dual-Gaze Query Network for Salient Object Detection

TL;DR

DualGazeNet is a simple, biologically inspired Transformer-based model for salient object detection that outperforms complex architectures in accuracy, speed, and efficiency, inspired by human visual processing.

Contribution

This work introduces DualGazeNet, a novel biologically inspired Transformer framework that models dual-pathway processing and attention, achieving state-of-the-art results with reduced complexity.

Findings

Surpasses 25 state-of-the-art methods in RGB SOD benchmarks.

Achieves 60% higher inference speed and 53.4% fewer FLOPs than similar Transformer baselines.

Demonstrates strong cross-domain generalization on camouflaged and underwater SOD tasks.

Abstract

Recent salient object detection (SOD) methods aim to improve performance in four key directions: semantic enhancement, boundary refinement, auxiliary task supervision, and multi-modal fusion. In pursuit of continuous gains, these approaches have evolved toward increasingly sophisticated architectures with multi-stage pipelines, specialized fusion modules, edge-guided learning, and elaborate attention mechanisms. However, this complexity paradoxically introduces feature redundancy and cross-component interference that obscure salient cues, ultimately reaching performance bottlenecks. In contrast, human vision achieves efficient salient object identification without such architectural complexity. This contrast raises a fundamental question: can we design a biologically grounded yet architecturally simple SOD framework that dispenses with most of this engineering complexity, while achieving state-of-the-art accuracy, computational efficiency, and interpretability? In this work, we answer this question affirmatively by introducing DualGazeNet, a biologically inspired pure Transformer framework that models the dual biological principles of robust representation learning and magnocellular-parvocellular dual-pathway processing with cortical attention modulation in the human visual system. Extensive experiments on five RGB SOD benchmarks show that DualGazeNet consistently surpasses 25 state-of-the-art CNN- and Transformer-based methods. On average, DualGazeNet achieves about 60\% higher inference speed and 53.4\% fewer FLOPs than four Transformer-based baselines of similar capacity (VST++, MDSAM, Sam2unet, and BiRefNet). Moreover, DualGazeNet exhibits strong cross-domain generalization, achieving leading or highly competitive performance on camouflaged and underwater SOD benchmarks without relying on additional modalities.