  Recently, with the advent of deep convolutional neural networks (DCNN), the
improvements in visual saliency prediction research are impressive. One
possible direction to approach the next improvement is to fully characterize
the multi-scale saliency-influential factors with a computationally-friendly
module in DCNN architectures. In this work, we proposed an end-to-end dilated
inception network (DINet) for visual saliency prediction. It captures
multi-scale contextual features effectively with very limited extra parameters.
Instead of utilizing parallel standard convolutions with different kernel sizes
as the existing inception module, our proposed dilated inception module (DIM)
uses parallel dilated convolutions with different dilation rates which can
significantly reduce the computation load while enriching the diversity of
receptive fields in feature maps. Moreover, the performance of our saliency
model is further improved by using a set of linear normalization-based
probability distribution distance metrics as loss functions. As such, we can
formulate saliency prediction as a probability distribution prediction task for
global saliency inference instead of a typical pixel-wise regression problem.
Experimental results on several challenging saliency benchmark datasets
demonstrate that our DINet with proposed loss functions can achieve
state-of-the-art performance with shorter inference time.
