Multiple Graph Affinity Interactive Network and a Variable Illumination Dataset for RGBT Image Salient Object Detection

Salient object detection (SOD) of images refers to simulating the attention mechanism of human vision to capture the most attractive objects in an image. Current SOD mainly relies on RGB images captured by optical cameras. However, existing optical cameras are not comparable to the human visual system, especially in poorly illumination scenes. Our human visual system is able to resolve scenes well in low light conditions, while optical cameras can barely image without enough illumination. To make machine vision closer to the imaging of the human eye, we propose to use thermal infrared (T) images to compensate RGB images and build a variable illumination RGBT dataset named VI-RGBT1500 for SOD. This dataset is collected under three different illumination conditions including sufficient illumination, uneven illumination and insufficient illumination to fully demonstrate the superiority of the RGBT image combination. Furthermore, we propose a multiple graph affinity interactive (MGAI) network to validate the proposed dataset. Our network structure is simple using only the MGAI to fuse the features of different modalities. Meanwhile, the MGAI model highlights valuable information during the interaction, which facilitates feature representation under variable illumination. The proposed VI-RGBT1500 dataset and three publicly available RGBT SOD datasets are used for the comparison experiments, and the results with the state-of-the-art methods prove that our VI-RGBT1500 dataset is valuable and the performance of the MGAI network is competitive. The VI-RGBT1500 dataset and the MGAI network are available at: https://github.com/huanglm-me/VI-RGBT1500.