PANet: Patch-Aware Network for Light Field Salient Object Detection

Most existing light field saliency detection methods have achieved great success by exploiting unique light field data-focus information in focal slices. However, they process light field data in a slicewise way, leading to suboptimal results because the relative contribution of different regions in focal slices is ignored. How we can comprehensively explore and integrate focused saliency regions that would positively contribute to accurate saliency detection. Answering this question inspires us to develop a new insight. In this article, we propose a patch-aware network to explore light field data in a regionwise way. First, we excavate focused salient regions with a proposed multisource learning module (MSLM), which generates a filtering strategy for integration followed by three guidances based on saliency, boundary, and position. Second, we design a sharpness recognition module (SRM) to refine and update this strategy and perform feature integration. With our proposed MSLM and SRM, we can obtain more accurate and complete saliency maps. Comprehensive experiments on three benchmark datasets prove that our proposed method achieves competitive performance over 2-D, 3-D, and 4-D salient object detection methods. The code and results of our method are available at https://github.com/OIPLab-DUT/IEEE-TCYB-PANet.