TCGNet: Type-correlation guidance for salient object detection

Contrast and part-whole relations induced by deep neural networks like Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Capsule Networks (CapsNets) have been known as two types of semantic cues for deep salient object detection. However, few works pay attention to their complementary properties in the context of saliency prediction. In this paper, we probe into this issue and propose a Type-Correlation Guidance Network (TCGNet) for salient object detection. Specifically, a Multi-Type Cue Correlation (MTCC) covering CNNs and CapsNets is designed to extract the contrast and part-whole relational semantics, respectively. Using MTCC, two correlation matrices containing complementary information are computed with these two types of semantics. In return, these correlation matrices are used to guide the learning of the above semantics to generate better saliency cues. Besides, a Type Interaction Attention (TIA) is developed to interact semantics from CNNs and CapsNets for the aim of saliency prediction. Experiments and analysis on five benchmarks show the superiority of the proposed approach. Codes has been released on https://github.com/liuyi1989/TCGNet.