Abstract:

Salient object detection aims at identifying the visually interesting object regions that are consistent with human perception. Multispectral remote sensing images provide rich radiometric information in revealing the physical properties of the observed objects, which leads to great potential to perform salient object detection for remote sensing images. Conventional salient object detection methods often employ handcrafted features to predict saliency by evaluating the pixel-wise or superpixel-wise contrast. With the recent use of deep learning framework, in particular, fully convolutional neural networks, there has been profound progress in visual saliency detection. However, this success has not been extended to multispectral remote sensing images, and existing multispectral salient object detection methods are still mainly based on handcrafted features, essentially due to the difficulties in image acquisition and labeling. In this paper, we propose a novel deep residual network based on a top-down model, which is trained in an end-to-end manner to tackle the above issues in multispectral salient object detection. Our model effectively exploits the saliency cues at different levels of the deep residual network. To overcome the limited availability of remote sensing images in training of our deep residual network, we also introduce a new spectral image reconstruction model that can generate multispectral images from RGB images. Our extensive experimental results using both multispectral and RGB salient object detection datasets demonstrate a significant performance improvement of more than 10% improvement compared with the state-of-the-art methods.

Key words: deep residual network; salient object detection; top-down model; remote sensing image processing