Unleashing the Power of Motion and Depth: A Selective Fusion Strategy for RGB-D Video Salient Object Detection

Applying salient object detection (SOD) to RGB-D videos is an emerging task called RGB-D VSOD and has recently gained increasing interest, due to considerable performance gains of incorporating motion and depth and that RGB-D videos can be easily captured now in daily life. Existing RGB-D VSOD models have different attempts to derive motion cues, in which extracting motion information explicitly from optical flow appears to be a more effective and promising alternative. Despite this, there remains a key issue that how to effectively utilize optical flow and depth to assist the RGB modality in SOD. Previous methods always treat optical flow and depth equally with respect to model designs, without explicitly considering their unequal contributions in individual scenarios, limiting the potential of motion and depth. To address this issue and unleash the power of motion and depth, we propose a novel selective cross-modal fusion framework (SMFNet) for RGB-D VSOD, incorporating a pixel-level selective fusion strategy (PSF) that achieves optimal fusion of optical flow and depth based on their actual contributions. Besides, we propose a multi-dimensional selective attention module (MSAM) to integrate the fused features derived from PSF with the remaining RGB modality at multiple dimensions, effectively enhancing feature representation to generate refined features. We conduct comprehensive evaluation of SMFNet against 19 state-of-the-art models on both RDVS and DVisal datasets, making the evaluation the most comprehensive RGB-D VSOD benchmark up to date, and it also demonstrates the superiority of SMFNet over other models. Meanwhile, evaluation on five video benchmark datasets incorporating synthetic depth validates the efficacy of SMFNet as well. Our code and benchmark results are made publicly available at https://github.com/Jia-hao999/SMFNet.