  Image saliency detection has recently witnessed rapid progress due to deep
convolutional neural networks. However, none of the existing methods is able to
identify object instances in the detected salient regions. In this paper, we
present a salient instance segmentation method that produces a saliency mask
with distinct object instance labels for an input image. Our method consists of
three steps, estimating saliency map, detecting salient object contours and
identifying salient object instances. For the first two steps, we propose a
multiscale saliency refinement network, which generates high-quality salient
region masks and salient object contours. Once integrated with multiscale
combinatorial grouping and a MAP-based subset optimization framework, our
method can generate very promising salient object instance segmentation
results. To promote further research and evaluation of salient instance
segmentation, we also construct a new database of 1000 images and their
pixelwise salient instance annotations. Experimental results demonstrate that
our proposed method is capable of achieving state-of-the-art performance on all
public benchmarks for salient region detection as well as on our new dataset
for salient instance segmentation.
