Scene context-aware salient object detection

Salient object detection identifies objects in an image that grab visual attention. Although contextual features are considered in recent literature, they often fail in real-world complex scenarios. We observe that this is mainly due to two issues: First, most existing datasets consist of simple foregrounds and backgrounds that hardly represent real-life scenarios. Second, current methods only learn contextual features of salient objects, which are insufficient to model high-level semantics for saliency reasoning in complex scenes. To address these problems, we first construct a new large-scale dataset with complex scenes in this paper. We then propose a context-aware learning approach to explicitly exploit the semantic scene contexts. Specifically, two modules are proposed to achieve the goal: 1) a Semantic Scene Context Refinement module to enhance contextual features learned from salient objects with scene context, and 2) a Contextual Instance Transformer to learn contextual relations between objects and scene context. To our knowledge, such high-level semantic contextual information of image scenes is under-explored for saliency detection in the literature. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art techniques in complex scenarios for saliency detection, and transfers well to other existing datasets. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/SirisAvishek/Scene_Context_Aware_Saliency.