Delving into Salient Object Subitizing and Detection

Subitizing (i.e., instant judgement on the number) and detection of salient objects are human inborn abilities. These two tasks influence each other in the human visual system. In this paper, we delve into the complementarity of these two tasks. We propose a multi-task deep neural network with weight prediction for salient object detection, where the parameters of an adaptive weight layer are dynamically determined by an auxiliary subitizing network. The numerical representation of salient objects is therefore embedded into the spatial representation. The proposed joint network can be trained end-to-end using back-propagation. Experiments show the proposed multi-task network outperforms existing multi-task architectures, and the auxiliary subitizing network provides strong guidance to salient object detection by reducing false positives and producing coherent saliency maps. Moreover, the proposed method is an unconstrained method able to handle images with/without salient objects. Finally, we show state-of-the-art performance on different salient object datasets.