DFTR: Depth-supervised Hierarchical Feature Fusion Transformer for Salient Object Detection
Automated salient object detection (SOD) plays an increasingly crucial role in many computer vision applications. Although existing frameworks achieve impressive SOD performances especially with the development of deep learning techniques, their performances still have room for improvement. In this work, we propose a novel pure Transformer-based SOD framework, namely Depth-supervised hierarchical feature Fusion TRansformer (DFTR), to further improve the accuracy of both RGB and RGB-D SOD. The proposed DFTR involves three primary improvements: 1) The backbone of feature encoder is switched from a convolutional neural network to a Swin Transformer for more effective feature extraction; 2) We propose a multi-scale feature aggregation (MFA) module to fully exploit the multi-scale features encoded by the Swin Transformer in a coarse-to-fine manner; 3) Following recent studies, we formulate an auxiliary task of depth map prediction and use the ground-truth depth maps as extra supervision signals for network learning. To enable bidirectional information flow between saliency and depth branches, a novel multi-task feature fusion (MFF) module is integrated into our DFTR. We extensively evaluate the proposed DFTR on ten benchmarking datasets. Experimental results show that our DFTR consistently outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods for both RGB and RGB-D SOD tasks. The code and model will be released.
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