  In this work, we propose an efficient and effective approach for
unconstrained salient object detection in images using deep convolutional
neural networks. Instead of generating thousands of candidate bounding boxes
and refining them, our network directly learns to generate the saliency map
containing the exact number of salient objects. During training, we convert the
ground-truth rectangular boxes to Gaussian distributions that better capture
the ROI regarding individual salient objects. During inference, the network
predicts Gaussian distributions centered at salient objects with an appropriate
covariance, from which bounding boxes are easily inferred. Notably, our network
performs saliency map prediction without pixel-level annotations, salient
object detection without object proposals, and salient object subitizing
simultaneously, all in a single pass within a unified framework. Extensive
experiments show that our approach outperforms existing methods on various
datasets by a large margin, and achieves more than 100 fps with VGG16 network
on a single GPU during inference.
