From Semantic Categories to Fixations: A Novel Weakly-Supervised Visual-Auditory Saliency Detection Approach

Guotao Wang, Chenglizhao Chen, Deng-Ping Fan, Aimin Hao, Hong Qin; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021, pp. 15119-15128

Thanks to the rapid advances in the deep learning techniques and the wide availability of large-scale training sets, the performances of video saliency detection models have been improving steadily and significantly. However, the deep learning based visual-audio fixation prediction is still in its infancy. At present, only a few visual-audio sequences have been furnished with real fixations being recorded in the real visual-audio environment. Hence, it would be neither efficiency nor necessary to re-collect real fixations under the same visual-audio circumstance. To address the problem, this paper advocate a novel approach in a weakly-supervised manner to alleviating the demand of large-scale training sets for visual-audio model training. By using the video category tags only, we propose the selective class activation mapping (SCAM), which follows a coarse-to-fine strategy to select the most discriminative regions in the spatial-temporal-audio circumstance. Moreover, these regions exhibit high consistency with the real human-eye fixations, which could subsequently be employed as the pseudo GTs to train a new spatial-temporal-audio (STA) network. Without resorting to any real fixation, the performance of our STA network is comparable to that of the fully supervised ones.