Saliency methods are widely used to visualize which input features are deemed relevant to a model's prediction. However, their visual plausibility can obscure critical limitations. In this work, we propose a diagnostic test for class sensitivity: a method's ability to distinguish between competing class labels on the same input. Through extensive experiments, we show that many widely used saliency methods produce nearly identical explanations regardless of the class label, calling into question their reliability. We find that class-insensitive behavior persists across architectures and datasets, suggesting the failure mode is structural rather than model-specific. Motivated by these findings, we introduce CASE, a contrastive explanation method that isolates features uniquely discriminative for the predicted class. We evaluate CASE using the proposed diagnostic and a perturbation-based fidelity test, and show that it produces faithful and more class-specific explanations than existing methods.
Infrared small target detection (ISTD) plays a critical role in a wide range of civilian and military applications. Existing methods suffer from deficiencies in the localization of dim targets and the perception of contour information under dense clutter environments, severely limiting their detection performance. To tackle these issues, we propose a contour-aware and saliency priors embedding network (CSPENet) for ISTD. We first design a surround-convergent prior extraction module (SCPEM) that effectively captures the intrinsic characteristic of target contour pixel gradients converging toward their center. This module concurrently extracts two collaborative priors: a boosted saliency prior for accurate target localization and multi-scale structural priors for comprehensively enriching contour detail representation. Building upon this, we propose a dual-branch priors embedding architecture (DBPEA) that establishes differentiated feature fusion pathways, embedding these two priors at optimal network positions to achieve performance enhancement. Finally, we develop an attention-guided feature enhancement module (AGFEM) to refine feature representations and improve saliency estimation accuracy. Experimental results on public datasets NUDT-SIRST, IRSTD-1k, and NUAA-SIRST demonstrate that our CSPENet outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in detection performance. The code is available at https://github.com/IDIP2025/CSPENet.
Recently, salient object detection (SOD) methods have achieved impressive performance. However, salient regions predicted by existing methods usually contain unsaturated regions and shadows, which limits the model for reliable fine-grained predictions. To address this, we introduce the uncertainty guidance learning approach to SOD, intended to enhance the model's perception of uncertain regions. Specifically, we design a novel Uncertainty Guided Refinement Attention Network (UGRAN), which incorporates three important components, i.e., the Multilevel Interaction Attention (MIA) module, the Scale Spatial-Consistent Attention (SSCA) module, and the Uncertainty Refinement Attention (URA) module. Unlike conventional methods dedicated to enhancing features, the proposed MIA facilitates the interaction and perception of multilevel features, leveraging the complementary characteristics among multilevel features. Then, through the proposed SSCA, the salient information across diverse scales within the aggregated features can be integrated more comprehensively and integrally. In the subsequent steps, we utilize the uncertainty map generated from the saliency prediction map to enhance the model's perception capability of uncertain regions, generating a highly-saturated fine-grained saliency prediction map. Additionally, we devise an adaptive dynamic partition (ADP) mechanism to minimize the computational overhead of the URA module and improve the utilization of uncertainty guidance. Experiments on seven benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed UGRAN over the state-of-the-art methodologies. Codes will be released at https://github.com/I2-Multimedia-Lab/UGRAN.
Mesh saliency enhances the adaptability of 3D vision by identifying and emphasizing regions that naturally attract visual attention. To investigate the interaction between geometric structure and texture in shaping visual attention, we establish a comprehensive mesh saliency dataset, which is the first to systematically capture the differences in saliency distribution under both textured and non-textured visual conditions. Furthermore, we introduce mesh Mamba, a unified saliency prediction model based on a state space model (SSM), designed to adapt across various mesh types. Mesh Mamba effectively analyzes the geometric structure of the mesh while seamlessly incorporating texture features into the topological framework, ensuring coherence throughout appearance-enhanced modeling. More importantly, by subgraph embedding and a bidirectional SSM, the model enables global context modeling for both local geometry and texture, preserving the topological structure and improving the understanding of visual details and structural complexity. Through extensive theoretical and empirical validation, our model not only improves performance across various mesh types but also demonstrates high scalability and versatility, particularly through cross validations of various visual features.
News outlets' competition for attention in news interfaces has highlighted the need for demographically-aware saliency prediction models. Despite recent advancements in saliency detection applied to user interfaces (UI), existing datasets are limited in size and demographic representation. We present a deep learning framework that enhances the SaRa (Saliency Ranking) model with DeepGaze IIE, improving Salient Object Ranking (SOR) performance by 10.7%. Our framework optimizes three key components: saliency map generation, grid segment scoring, and map normalization. Through a two-fold experiment using eye-tracking (30 participants) and mouse-tracking (375 participants aged 13--70), we analyze attention patterns across demographic groups. Statistical analysis reveals significant age-based variations (p < 0.05, {\epsilon^2} = 0.042), with older users (36--70) engaging more with textual content and younger users (13--35) interacting more with images. Mouse-tracking data closely approximates eye-tracking behavior (sAUC = 0.86) and identifies UI elements that immediately stand out, validating its use in large-scale studies. We conclude that saliency studies should prioritize gathering data from a larger, demographically representative sample and report exact demographic distributions.
Textured meshes significantly enhance the realism and detail of objects by mapping intricate texture details onto the geometric structure of 3D models. This advancement is valuable across various applications, including entertainment, education, and industry. While traditional mesh saliency studies focus on non-textured meshes, our work explores the complexities introduced by detailed texture patterns. We present a new dataset for textured mesh saliency, created through an innovative eye-tracking experiment in a six degrees of freedom (6-DOF) VR environment. This dataset addresses the limitations of previous studies by providing comprehensive eye-tracking data from multiple viewpoints, thereby advancing our understanding of human visual behavior and supporting more accurate and effective 3D content creation. Our proposed model predicts saliency maps for textured mesh surfaces by treating each triangular face as an individual unit and assigning a saliency density value to reflect the importance of each local surface region. The model incorporates a texture alignment module and a geometric extraction module, combined with an aggregation module to integrate texture and geometry for precise saliency prediction. We believe this approach will enhance the visual fidelity of geometric processing algorithms while ensuring efficient use of computational resources, which is crucial for real-time rendering and high-detail applications such as VR and gaming.
As object detection techniques continue to evolve, understanding their relationships with complementary visual tasks becomes crucial for optimising model architectures and computational resources. This paper investigates the correlations between object detection accuracy and two fundamental visual tasks: depth prediction and visual saliency prediction. Through comprehensive experiments using state-of-the-art models (DeepGaze IIE, Depth Anything, DPT-Large, and Itti's model) on COCO and Pascal VOC datasets, we find that visual saliency shows consistently stronger correlations with object detection accuracy (mA$\rho$ up to 0.459 on Pascal VOC) compared to depth prediction (mA$\rho$ up to 0.283). Our analysis reveals significant variations in these correlations across object categories, with larger objects showing correlation values up to three times higher than smaller objects. These findings suggest incorporating visual saliency features into object detection architectures could be more beneficial than depth information, particularly for specific object categories. The observed category-specific variations also provide insights for targeted feature engineering and dataset design improvements, potentially leading to more efficient and accurate object detection systems.
This paper reviews the Challenge on Video Saliency Prediction at AIM 2024. The goal of the participants was to develop a method for predicting accurate saliency maps for the provided set of video sequences. Saliency maps are widely exploited in various applications, including video compression, quality assessment, visual perception studies, the advertising industry, etc. For this competition, a previously unused large-scale audio-visual mouse saliency (AViMoS) dataset of 1500 videos with more than 70 observers per video was collected using crowdsourced mouse tracking. The dataset collection methodology has been validated using conventional eye-tracking data and has shown high consistency. Over 30 teams registered in the challenge, and there are 7 teams that submitted the results in the final phase. The final phase solutions were tested and ranked by commonly used quality metrics on a private test subset. The results of this evaluation and the descriptions of the solutions are presented in this report. All data, including the private test subset, is made publicly available on the challenge homepage - https://challenges.videoprocessing.ai/challenges/video-saliency-prediction.html.
Saliency prediction models are constrained by the limited diversity and quantity of labeled data. Standard data augmentation techniques such as rotating and cropping alter scene composition, affecting saliency. We propose a novel data augmentation method for deep saliency prediction that edits natural images while preserving the complexity and variability of real-world scenes. Since saliency depends on high-level and low-level features, our approach involves learning both by incorporating photometric and semantic attributes such as color, contrast, brightness, and class. To that end, we introduce a saliency-guided cross-attention mechanism that enables targeted edits on the photometric properties, thereby enhancing saliency within specific image regions. Experimental results show that our data augmentation method consistently improves the performance of various saliency models. Moreover, leveraging the augmentation features for saliency prediction yields superior performance on publicly available saliency benchmarks. Our predictions align closely with human visual attention patterns in the edited images, as validated by a user study.
Although most existing multi-modal salient object detection (SOD) methods demonstrate effectiveness through training models from scratch, the limited multi-modal data hinders these methods from reaching optimality. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to explore and exploit the powerful feature representation and zero-shot generalization ability of the pre-trained Segment Anything Model (SAM) for multi-modal SOD. Despite serving as a recent vision fundamental model, driving the class-agnostic SAM to comprehend and detect salient objects accurately is non-trivial, especially in challenging scenes. To this end, we develop \underline{SAM} with se\underline{m}antic f\underline{e}ature fu\underline{s}ion guidanc\underline{e} (Sammese), which incorporates multi-modal saliency-specific knowledge into SAM to adapt SAM to multi-modal SOD tasks. However, it is difficult for SAM trained on single-modal data to directly mine the complementary benefits of multi-modal inputs and comprehensively utilize them to achieve accurate saliency prediction. To address these issues, we first design a multi-modal complementary fusion module to extract robust multi-modal semantic features by integrating information from visible and thermal or depth image pairs. Then, we feed the extracted multi-modal semantic features into both the SAM image encoder and mask decoder for fine-tuning and prompting, respectively. Specifically, in the image encoder, a multi-modal adapter is proposed to adapt the single-modal SAM to multi-modal information. In the mask decoder, a semantic-geometric prompt generation strategy is proposed to produce corresponding embeddings with various saliency cues. Extensive experiments on both RGB-D and RGB-T SOD benchmarks show the effectiveness of the proposed framework. The code will be available at \url{https://github.com/Angknpng/Sammese}.
Understanding and predicting viewer attention in omnidirectional videos (ODVs) is crucial for enhancing user engagement in virtual and augmented reality applications. Although both audio and visual modalities are essential for saliency prediction in ODVs, the joint exploitation of these two modalities has been limited, primarily due to the absence of large-scale audio-visual saliency databases and comprehensive analyses. This paper comprehensively investigates audio-visual attention in ODVs from both subjective and objective perspectives. Specifically, we first introduce a new audio-visual saliency database for omnidirectional videos, termed AVS-ODV database, containing 162 ODVs and corresponding eye movement data collected from 60 subjects under three audio modes including mute, mono, and ambisonics. Based on the constructed AVS-ODV database, we perform an in-depth analysis of how audio influences visual attention in ODVs. To advance the research on audio-visual saliency prediction for ODVs, we further establish a new benchmark based on the AVS-ODV database by testing numerous state-of-the-art saliency models, including visual-only models and audio-visual models. In addition, given the limitations of current models, we propose an innovative omnidirectional audio-visual saliency prediction network (OmniAVS), which is built based on the U-Net architecture, and hierarchically fuses audio and visual features from the multimodal aligned embedding space. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed OmniAVS model outperforms other state-of-the-art models on both ODV AVS prediction and traditional AVS predcition tasks. The AVS-ODV database and OmniAVS model will be released to facilitate future research.
Recent advancements in deep convolutional neural networks have significantly improved the performance of saliency prediction. However, the manual configuration of the neural network architectures requires domain knowledge expertise and can still be time-consuming and error-prone. To solve this, we propose a new Neural Architecture Search (NAS) framework for saliency prediction with two contributions. Firstly, a supernet for saliency prediction is built with a weight-sharing network containing all candidate architectures, by integrating a dynamic convolution into the encoder-decoder in the supernet, termed SalNAS. Secondly, despite the fact that SalNAS is highly efficient (20.98 million parameters), it can suffer from the lack of generalization. To solve this, we propose a self-knowledge distillation approach, termed Self-KD, that trains the student SalNAS with the weighted average information between the ground truth and the prediction from the teacher model. The teacher model, while sharing the same architecture, contains the best-performing weights chosen by cross-validation. Self-KD can generalize well without the need to compute the gradient in the teacher model, enabling an efficient training system. By utilizing Self-KD, SalNAS outperforms other state-of-the-art saliency prediction models in most evaluation rubrics across seven benchmark datasets while being a lightweight model. The code will be available at https://github.com/chakkritte/SalNAS
In real-world scenarios, human actions often fall into a long-tailed distribution. It makes the existing skeleton-based action recognition works, which are mostly designed based on balanced datasets, suffer from a sharp performance degradation. Recently, many efforts have been madeto image/video long-tailed learning. However, directly applying them to skeleton data can be sub-optimal due to the lack of consideration of the crucial spatial-temporal motion patterns, especially for some modality-specific methodologies such as data augmentation. To this end, considering the crucial role of the body parts in the spatially concentrated human actions, we attend to the mixing augmentations and propose a novel method, Shap-Mix, which improves long-tailed learning by mining representative motion patterns for tail categories. Specifically, we first develop an effective spatial-temporal mixing strategy for the skeleton to boost representation quality. Then, the employed saliency guidance method is presented, consisting of the saliency estimation based on Shapley value and a tail-aware mixing policy. It preserves the salient motion parts of minority classes in mixed data, explicitly establishing the relationships between crucial body structure cues and high-level semantics. Extensive experiments on three large-scale skeleton datasets show our remarkable performance improvement under both long-tailed and balanced settings. Our project is publicly available at: https://jhang2020.github.io/Projects/Shap-Mix/Shap-Mix.html.
Visual attention modeling, important for interpreting and prioritizing visual stimuli, plays a significant role in applications such as marketing, multimedia, and robotics. Traditional saliency prediction models, especially those based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) or Transformers, achieve notable success by leveraging large-scale annotated datasets. However, the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) models that use Transformers are computationally expensive. Additionally, separate models are often required for each image type, lacking a unified approach. In this paper, we propose Saliency Unification through Mamba (SUM), a novel approach that integrates the efficient long-range dependency modeling of Mamba with U-Net to provide a unified model for diverse image types. Using a novel Conditional Visual State Space (C-VSS) block, SUM dynamically adapts to various image types, including natural scenes, web pages, and commercial imagery, ensuring universal applicability across different data types. Our comprehensive evaluations across five benchmarks demonstrate that SUM seamlessly adapts to different visual characteristics and consistently outperforms existing models. These results position SUM as a versatile and powerful tool for advancing visual attention modeling, offering a robust solution universally applicable across different types of visual content.
RGB and Thermal (RGBT) Salient Object Detection (SOD) aims to achieve high-quality saliency prediction by exploiting the complementary information of visible and thermal image pairs, which are initially captured in an unaligned manner. However, existing methods are tailored for manually aligned image pairs, which are labor-intensive, and directly applying these methods to original unaligned image pairs could significantly degrade their performance. In this paper, we make the first attempt to address RGBT SOD for initially captured RGB and thermal image pairs without manual alignment. Specifically, we propose a Semantics-guided Asymmetric Correlation Network (SACNet) that consists of two novel components: 1) an asymmetric correlation module utilizing semantics-guided attention to model cross-modal correlations specific to unaligned salient regions; 2) an associated feature sampling module to sample relevant thermal features according to the corresponding RGB features for multi-modal feature integration. In addition, we construct a unified benchmark dataset called UVT2000, containing 2000 RGB and thermal image pairs directly captured from various real-world scenes without any alignment, to facilitate research on alignment-free RGBT SOD. Extensive experiments on both aligned and unaligned datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superior performance of our method. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/Angknpng/SACNet.
In this paper, we present a novel methodology we call MDS-ViTNet (Multi Decoder Saliency by Vision Transformer Network) for enhancing visual saliency prediction or eye-tracking. This approach holds significant potential for diverse fields, including marketing, medicine, robotics, and retail. We propose a network architecture that leverages the Vision Transformer, moving beyond the conventional ImageNet backbone. The framework adopts an encoder-decoder structure, with the encoder utilizing a Swin transformer to efficiently embed most important features. This process involves a Transfer Learning method, wherein layers from the Vision Transformer are converted by the Encoder Transformer and seamlessly integrated into a CNN Decoder. This methodology ensures minimal information loss from the original input image. The decoder employs a multi-decoding technique, utilizing dual decoders to generate two distinct attention maps. These maps are subsequently combined into a singular output via an additional CNN model. Our trained model MDS-ViTNet achieves state-of-the-art results across several benchmarks. Committed to fostering further collaboration, we intend to make our code, models, and datasets accessible to the public.
Over the past few years, deep neural models have made considerable advances in image quality assessment (IQA). However, the underlying reasons for their success remain unclear, owing to the complex nature of deep neural networks. IQA aims to describe how the human visual system (HVS) works and to create its efficient approximations. On the other hand, Saliency Prediction task aims to emulate HVS via determining areas of visual interest. Thus, we believe that saliency plays a crucial role in human perception. In this work, we conduct an empirical study that reveals the relation between IQA and Saliency Prediction tasks, demonstrating that the former incorporates knowledge of the latter. Moreover, we introduce a novel SACID dataset of saliency-aware compressed images and conduct a large-scale comparison of classic and neural-based IQA methods. All supplementary code and data will be available at the time of publication.
Toward desirable saliency prediction, the types and numbers of inputs for a salient object detection (SOD) algorithm may dynamically change in many real-life applications. However, existing SOD algorithms are mainly designed or trained for one particular type of inputs, failing to be generalized to other types of inputs. Consequentially, more types of SOD algorithms need to be prepared in advance for handling different types of inputs, raising huge hardware and research costs. Differently, in this paper, we propose a new type of SOD task, termed Arbitrary Modality SOD (AM SOD). The most prominent characteristics of AM SOD are that the modality types and modality numbers will be arbitrary or dynamically changed. The former means that the inputs to the AM SOD algorithm may be arbitrary modalities such as RGB, depths, or even any combination of them. While, the latter indicates that the inputs may have arbitrary modality numbers as the input type is changed, e.g. single-modality RGB image, dual-modality RGB-Depth (RGB-D) images or triple-modality RGB-Depth-Thermal (RGB-D-T) images. Accordingly, a preliminary solution to the above challenges, \i.e. a modality switch network (MSN), is proposed in this paper. In particular, a modality switch feature extractor (MSFE) is first designed to extract discriminative features from each modality effectively by introducing some modality indicators, which will generate some weights for modality switching. Subsequently, a dynamic fusion module (DFM) is proposed to adaptively fuse features from a variable number of modalities based on a novel Transformer structure. Finally, a new dataset, named AM-XD, is constructed to facilitate research on AM SOD. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our AM SOD method can effectively cope with changes in the type and number of input modalities for robust salient object detection.
In the highly competitive area of product marketing, the visibility of brand logos on packaging plays a crucial role in shaping consumer perception, directly influencing the success of the product. This paper introduces a comprehensive framework to measure the brand logo's attention on a packaging design. The proposed method consists of three steps. The first step leverages YOLOv8 for precise logo detection across prominent datasets, FoodLogoDet-1500 and LogoDet-3K. The second step involves modeling the user's visual attention with a novel saliency prediction model tailored for the packaging context. The proposed saliency model combines the visual elements with text maps employing a transformers-based architecture to predict user attention maps. In the third step, by integrating logo detection with a saliency map generation, the framework provides a comprehensive brand attention score. The effectiveness of the proposed method is assessed module by module, ensuring a thorough evaluation of each component. Comparing logo detection and saliency map prediction with state-of-the-art models shows the superiority of the proposed methods. To investigate the robustness of the proposed brand attention score, we collected a unique dataset to examine previous psychophysical hypotheses related to brand visibility. the results show that the brand attention score is in line with all previous studies. Also, we introduced seven new hypotheses to check the impact of position, orientation, presence of person, and other visual elements on brand attention. This research marks a significant stride in the intersection of cognitive psychology, computer vision, and marketing, paving the way for advanced, consumer-centric packaging designs.
In recent years, deep saliency models have made significant progress in predicting human visual attention. However, the mechanisms behind their success remain largely unexplained due to the opaque nature of deep neural networks. In this paper, we present a novel analytic framework that sheds light on the implicit features learned by saliency models and provides principled interpretation and quantification of their contributions to saliency prediction. Our approach decomposes these implicit features into interpretable bases that are explicitly aligned with semantic attributes and reformulates saliency prediction as a weighted combination of probability maps connecting the bases and saliency. By applying our framework, we conduct extensive analyses from various perspectives, including the positive and negative weights of semantics, the impact of training data and architectural designs, the progressive influences of fine-tuning, and common failure patterns of state-of-the-art deep saliency models. Additionally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework by exploring visual attention characteristics in various application scenarios, such as the atypical attention of people with autism spectrum disorder, attention to emotion-eliciting stimuli, and attention evolution over time. Our code is publicly available at \url{https://github.com/szzexpoi/saliency_analysis}.