  Top-down saliency models produce a probability map that peaks at target
locations specified by a task/goal such as object detection. They are usually
trained in a fully supervised setting involving pixel-level annotations of
objects. We propose a weakly supervised top-down saliency framework using only
binary labels that indicate the presence/absence of an object in an image.
First, the probabilistic contribution of each image region to the confidence of
a CNN-based image classifier is computed through a backtracking strategy to
produce top-down saliency. From a set of saliency maps of an image produced by
fast bottom-up saliency approaches, we select the best saliency map suitable
for the top-down task. The selected bottom-up saliency map is combined with the
top-down saliency map. Features having high combined saliency are used to train
a linear SVM classifier to estimate feature saliency. This is integrated with
combined saliency and further refined through a multi-scale
superpixel-averaging of saliency map. We evaluate the performance of the
proposed weakly supervised topdown saliency and achieve comparable performance
with fully supervised approaches. Experiments are carried out on seven
challenging datasets and quantitative results are compared with 40 closely
related approaches across 4 different applications.
