  Computer vision algorithms with pixel-wise labeling tasks, such as semantic
segmentation and salient object detection, have gone through a significant
accuracy increase with the incorporation of deep learning. Deep segmentation
methods slightly modify and fine-tune pre-trained networks that have hundreds
of millions of parameters. In this work, we question the need to have such
memory demanding networks for the specific task of salient object segmentation.
To this end, we propose a way to learn a memory-efficient network from scratch
by training it only on salient object detection datasets. Our method encodes
images to gridized superpixels that preserve both the object boundaries and the
connectivity rules of regular pixels. This representation allows us to use
convolutional neural networks that operate on regular grids. By using these
encoded images, we train a memory-efficient network using only 0.048\% of the
number of parameters that other deep salient object detection networks have.
Our method shows comparable accuracy with the state-of-the-art deep salient
object detection methods and provides a faster and a much more memory-efficient
alternative to them. Due to its easy deployment, such a network is preferable
for applications in memory limited devices such as mobile phones and IoT
devices.
