  We consider an interesting problem-salient instance segmentation in this
paper. Other than producing bounding boxes, our network also outputs
high-quality instance-level segments. Taking into account the
category-independent property of each target, we design a single stage salient
instance segmentation framework, with a novel segmentation branch. Our new
branch regards not only local context inside each detection window but also its
surrounding context, enabling us to distinguish the instances in the same scope
even with obstruction. Our network is end-to-end trainable and runs at a fast
speed (40 fps when processing an image with resolution 320x320). We evaluate
our approach on a publicly available benchmark and show that it outperforms
other alternative solutions. We also provide a thorough analysis of the design
choices to help readers better understand the functions of each part of our
network. The source code can be found at
\url{https://github.com/RuochenFan/S4Net}.
