Multi-interactive Encoder-decoder Network for RGBT Salient Object Detection

RGBT salient object detection (SOD) aims to segment the common prominent regions by exploring and exploiting the complementary information of visible and thermal infrared images. However, existing methods simply integrate features of these two modalities, and thus could not explore the potentials of their complementarity. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-interactive encoder-decoder network to achieve an elaborative fusion for RGBT SOD. Our network relies on an encoder-decoder for the feature extraction and fusion, and we design a multi-interaction block (MIB) to model the interactions of different modalities, different layers and local-global information. In particular, we interact and integrate the multi-level features of different modalities in a two-stream decoder, which could fuse modal information sufficiently while maintaining their own specific feature representations for more robust detection performance. Moreover, each MIB block accepts both information from previous MIB and global context to restore more spatial details and object semantics respectively. Extensive experiments on the existing RGBT SOD datasets show that the proposed method achieves outstanding performance against the state-of-the-art algorithms.