Synergistic saliency and depth prediction for RGB-D saliency detection

Depth information available from an RGB-D camera can be useful in segmenting salient objects when figure/ground cues from RGB channels are weak. This has motivated the development of several RGB-D saliency datasets and algorithms that use all four channels of the RGB-D data for both training and inference. Unfortunately, existing RGB-D saliency datasets are small, leading to overfitting and poor generalization. Here we demonstrate a system for RGB-D saliency detection that makes effective joint use of large RGB saliency datasets with hand-labelled saliency ground truth together, and smaller RGB-D saliency datasets {\em without} saliency ground truth. This novel prediction-guided cross-refinement network is trained to jointly estimate both saliency and depth, allowing mutual refinement between feature representations tuned for the two respective tasks. An adversarial stage resolves domain shift between RGB and RGB-D saliency datasets, allowing representations for saliency and depth estimation to be aligned on either. Critically, our system does not require saliency ground-truth for the RGB-D datasets, making it easier to expand these datasets for training, and does not require the D channel for inference, allowing the method to be used for the much broader range of applications where only RGB data are available. Evaluation on seven RGBD datasets demonstrates that, without using hand-labelled saliency ground truth for RGB-D datasets and using only the RGB channels of these datasets at inference, our system achieves performance that is comparable to state-of-the-art methods that use hand-labelled saliency maps for RGB-D data at training and use the depth channels of these datasets at inference.