Salient object detection based on edge-interior feature fusion

Recently, existing FCNs-based methods have shown their advantages in processing object boundaries. However, these methods still suffer from false object interference, which appears in saliency predictions. To solve this problem, an edge-interior feature fusion (EIFF) framework is proposed, which consists of an internal-boundary decoupled generation structure with receptive field enlargement and attention mechanism enhancement, and a salient feature refinement module. Specifically, the framework first learns edge features and interior features through an internal-boundary decoupling generation network, which is supervised by labels obtained by decoupling ground-truth through an image erosion algorithm. Then, feature refinement module (FRM) is designed to purify the coarse prediction by focusing on the ambiguous regions through a mining strategy to generate the final saliency map. To compensate for shortcomings of the BCE and IU loss, we also introduce a weighted loss to guide our model to focus more on the error-prone parts. Experimental results on five benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed method performs favorably against 19 state-of-the-art approaches under four standard metrics.