Lightweight Progressive Multilevel Feature Collaborative Network for Remote Sensing Image Salient Object Detection

In recent years, numerous outstanding technologies have been proposed for salient object detection (SOD) in remote sensing images (RSIs), but most of them focus solely on improving performance while disregarding computational, thereby lacking portability and mobility. This article introduces a novel lightweight progressive multilevel feature collaborative network, termed LPMFCNet. This framework constructs progressive feature information through multilevel image content extraction and designs a multichannel interactive deep neural network with information fusion and filtering functions. First, a spatial detail enhancement module (SDEM) is devised to acquire distant feature information through intermediate branch expansion of receptive fields while preserving multiscale information extraction. Second, an advanced semantic interaction module (ASIM) is proposed to model distant dependency relationships between deep semantic features to better identify the positional information of salient objects. Finally, a multilevel feature collaboration module (MFCM) is designed to collaboratively utilize target features from a multilevel perspective, which fully mining deep-level semantic positional information while retaining target detail information. Extensive experimental comparisons are conducted on two remote sensing datasets with 17 advanced methods. Results demonstrate that the proposed method exhibits superior detection performance while maintaining lightweightness. The LPMFCNet only contains 3.26M parameters and runs 0.5G FLOPs for a <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$256\times 256$ </tex-math></inline-formula> image.