Weakly-Supervised Salient Object Detection With Saliency Bounding Boxes

In this paper, we propose a novel form of weak supervision for salient object detection (SOD) based on saliency bounding boxes, which are minimum rectangular boxes enclosing the salient objects. Based on this idea, we propose a novel weakly-supervised SOD method, by predicting pixel-level pseudo ground truth saliency maps from just saliency bounding boxes. Our method first takes advantage of the unsupervised SOD methods to generate initial saliency maps and addresses the over/under prediction problems, to obtain the initial pseudo ground truth saliency maps. We then iteratively refine the initial pseudo ground truth by learning a multi-task map refinement network with saliency bounding boxes. Finally, the final pseudo saliency maps are used to supervise the training of a salient object detector. Experimental results show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art weakly-supervised methods.