Deep Learning-based Unsupervised Salient Object Detection (USOD) mainly relies on the noisy saliency pseudo labels that have been generated from traditional handcraft methods or pre-trained networks. To cope with the noisy labels problem, a class of methods focus on only easy samples with reliable labels but ignore valuable knowledge in hard samples. In this paper, we propose a novel USOD method to mine rich and accurate saliency knowledge from both easy and hard samples. First, we propose a Confidence-aware Saliency Distilling (CSD) strategy that scores samples conditioned on samples' confidences, which guides the model to distill saliency knowledge from easy samples to hard samples progressively. Second, we propose a Boundary-aware Texture Matching (BTM) strategy to refine the boundaries of noisy labels by matching the textures around the predicted boundary. Extensive experiments on RGB, RGB-D, RGB-T, and video SOD benchmarks prove that our method achieves state-of-the-art USOD performance.
@article{arxiv.2207.05921,
title = {Texture-guided Saliency Distilling for Unsupervised Salient Object Detection},
author = {Huajun Zhou and Bo Qiao and Lingxiao Yang and Jianhuang Lai and Xiaohua Xie},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2207.05921},
year = {2023}
}