Multi-attention embedded network for salient object detection.

Although the salient object detection method based on the fully convolutional neural network has achieved better performance, how to learn effective feature representations in complex scenes to obtain more accurate saliency maps is still a challenge. In order to cope with the above-mentioned challenges, an addition or cascade structure is generally used to fuse feature information between multiple levels. However, these methods are susceptible to the influence of messy background information. The network may regard non-salient objects with similar salient appearances as target predictions, and the prediction results may be incomplete due to different appearance areas of salient objects. We design a network composed of multiple attention mechanisms to selectively integrate deep and shallow feature information, and more effectively deal with the transfer and fusion of features. In this paper, we propose a multi-attention embedded network (MAENet), which introduces attention mechanisms to give different feature information with different weights for handling the transfer and aggregation of features at different levels. The multi-attention feature aggregation (MAFA) module is proposed, which uses the channel attention mechanism to give different weights to the features to be fused, and then uses the spatial attention mechanism to selectively aggregate shallow edge information and deep abstract semantic features to avoid excessive redundant information which affects the saliency mapping, as well as suppressing non-salient areas with "salient" appearance. In addition, The multi-scale feature extraction (MFE) module and the self-attention (SA) module are also proposed for obtaining sufficiently rich and useful multi-scale context information and enhancing the function of the top layer. Finally, the attentional residual refinement (ARR) module is utilized to refine the saliency map after each feature fusion and further improve the input function. MAENet can accurately segment salient objects and provide clear local details. Experimental results on five benchmark datasets show that the proposed method achieves the favorable performance against 14 state-of-the-art methods on popular evaluation metrics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]