Unsupervised CNN-based Co-Saliency Detection with Graphical Optimization

Kuang-Jui Hsu, Chung-Chi Tsai, Yen-Yu Lin, Xiaoning Qian, Yung-Yu Chuang; Proceedings of the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018, pp. 485-501

In this paper, we address co-saliency detection in a set of images jointly covering objects of a specific class by an unsupervised convolutional neural network (CNN). Our method does not require any additional training data in the form of object masks. We decompose co-saliency detection into two sub-tasks, single-image saliency detection and cross-image co-occurrence region discovery corresponding to two novel unsupervised losses, the single-image saliency (SIS) loss and the co-occurrence (COOC) loss. The two losses are modeled on a graphical model where the former and the latter act as the unary and pairwise terms, respectively. These two tasks can be jointly optimized for generating co-saliency maps of high quality. Furthermore, the quality of the generated co-saliency maps can be enhanced via two extensions: map sharpening by self-paced learning and boundary preserving by fully connected conditional random fields. Experiments show that our method achieves superior results, even outperforming many supervised methods.