MRBENet: A Multiresolution Boundary Enhancement Network for Salient Object Detection

Salient Object Detection (SOD) simulates the human visual perception in locating the most attractive objects in the images. Existing methods based on convolutional neural networks have proven to be highly effective for SOD. However, in some cases, these methods cannot satisfy the need of both accurately detecting intact objects and maintaining their boundary details. In this paper, we present a Multiresolution Boundary Enhancement Network (MRBENet) that exploits edge features to optimize the location and boundary fineness of salient objects. We incorporate a deeper convolutional layer into the backbone network to extract high-level semantic features and indicate the location of salient objects. Edge features of different resolutions are extracted by a U-shaped network. We designed a Feature Fusion Module (FFM) to fuse edge features and salient features. Feature Aggregation Module (FAM) based on spatial attention performs multiscale convolutions to enhance salient features. The FFM and FAM allow the model to accurately locate salient objects and enhance boundary fineness. Extensive experiments on six benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed method is highly effective and improves the accuracy of salient object detection compared with state-of-the-art methods.