  Salient object detection has recently witnessed substantial progress due to
powerful features extracted using deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs).
However, existing CNN-based methods operate at the patch level instead of the
pixel level. Resulting saliency maps are typically blurry, especially near the
boundary of salient objects. Furthermore, image patches are treated as
independent samples even when they are overlapping, giving rise to significant
redundancy in computation and storage. In this CVPR 2016 paper, we propose an
end-to-end deep contrast network to overcome the aforementioned limitations.
Our deep network consists of two complementary components, a pixel-level fully
convolutional stream and a segment-wise spatial pooling stream. The first
stream directly produces a saliency map with pixel-level accuracy from an input
image. The second stream extracts segment-wise features very efficiently, and
better models saliency discontinuities along object boundaries. Finally, a
fully connected CRF model can be optionally incorporated to improve spatial
coherence and contour localization in the fused result from these two streams.
Experimental results demonstrate that our deep model significantly improves the
state of the art.
