PiCANet: Learning Pixel-Wise Contextual Attention for Saliency Detection

Nian Liu, Junwei Han, Ming Hsuan Yang

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

866 Scopus citations

Abstract

Contexts play an important role in the saliency detection task. However, given a context region, not all contextual information is helpful for the final task. In this paper, we propose a novel pixel-wise contextual attention network, i.e., the PiCANet, to learn to selectively attend to informative context locations for each pixel. Specifically, for each pixel, it can generate an attention map in which each attention weight corresponds to the contextual relevance at each context location. An attended contextual feature can then be constructed by selectively aggregating the contextual information. We formulate the proposed PiCANet in both global and local forms to attend to global and local contexts, respectively. Both models are fully differentiable and can be embedded into CNNs for joint training. We also incorporate the proposed models with the U-Net architecture to detect salient objects. Extensive experiments show that the proposed PiCANets can consistently improve saliency detection performance. The global and local PiCANets facilitate learning global contrast and homogeneousness, respectively. As a result, our saliency model can detect salient objects more accurately and uniformly, thus performing favorably against the state-of-the-art methods.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2018 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR 2018
PublisherIEEE Computer Society
Pages3089-3098
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9781538664209
DOIs
StatePublished - 14 Dec 2018
Event31st Meeting of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR 2018 - Salt Lake City, United States
Duration: 18 Jun 201822 Jun 2018

Publication series

NameProceedings of the IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
ISSN (Print)1063-6919

Conference

Conference31st Meeting of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR 2018
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CitySalt Lake City
Period18/06/1822/06/18

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