Abstract
Saliency detection aims to highlight the most relevant objects in an image. Methods using conventional models struggle whenever salient objects are pictured on top of a cluttered background while deep neural nets suffer from excess complexity and slow evaluation speeds. In this paper, we propose a simplifified convolutional neural network which combines local and global information through a multiresolution 4 × 5 grid structure. Instead of enforcing spacial coherence with a CRF or superpixels as is usually the case, we implemented a loss function inspired by the MumfordShah functional which penalizes errors on the boundary. We trained our model on the MSRA-B dataset, and tested it on six different saliency benchmark datasets. Results show that our method is on par with the state-of-the-art while reducing computation time by a factor of 18 to 100 times, enabling near real-time, high performance saliency detection