GDVIFNet: A generated depth and visible image fusion network with edge feature guidance for salient object detection.

Journal: Neural networks : the official journal of the International Neural Network Society
Published Date:

Abstract

In recent years, despite significant advancements in salient object detection (SOD), performance in complex interference environments remains suboptimal. To address these challenges, additional modalities like depth (SOD-D) or thermal imaging (SOD-T) are often introduced. However, existing methods typically rely on specialized depth or thermal devices to capture these modalities, which can be costly and inconvenient. To address this limitation using only a single RGB image, we propose GDVIFNet, a novel approach that leverages Depth Anything to generate depth images. Since these generated depth images may contain noise and artifacts, we incorporate self-supervised techniques to generate edge feature information. During the process of generating image edge features, the noise and artifacts present in the generated depth images can be effectively removed. Our method employs a dual-branch architecture, combining CNN and Transformer-based branches for feature extraction. We designed the step trimodal interaction unit (STIU) to fuse the RGB features with the depth features from the CNN branch and the self-cross attention fusion (SCF) to integrate RGB features with depth features from the Transformer branch. Finally, guided by edge features from our self-supervised edge guidance module (SEGM), we employ the CNN-Edge-Transformer step fusion (CETSF) to fuse features from both branches. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple datasets. Code can be found at https://github.com/typist2001/GDVIFNet.

Authors

  • Xiaogang Song
    Xi'an University of Technology, School of Computer Science and Engineering, Xi'an, 710048, China; Engineering Research Center of Human-machine integration intelligent robot, Universities of Shaanxi Province, Xi'an, 710048, China. Electronic address: songxg@xaut.edu.cn.
  • Yuping Tan
    Xi'an University of Technology, School of Computer Science and Engineering, Xi'an, 710048, China. Electronic address: 3200441274@stu.xaut.edu.cn.
  • Xiaochang Li
    State Key Laboratory of Animal Biotech Breeding and Frontiers Science Center for Molecular Design Breeding (MOE), China Agricultural University, Beijing 100193, China.
  • Xinhong Hei
    School of Computer Science and Engineering, Xi'an University of Technology, Xi'an 710048, China.