Boundary-Aware Salient Object Detection in Optical Remote-Sensing Images

Different from the traditional natural scene images, optical remote-sensing images (RSIs) suffer from diverse imaging orientations, cluttered backgrounds, and various scene types. Therefore, the object-detection methods salient to optical RSIs require effective localization and segmentation to deal with complex scenarios, especially small targets, serious occlusion, and multiple targets. However, the existing models’ experimental results are incapable of distinguishing salient objects and backgrounds using clear boundaries. To tackle this problem, we introduce boundary information to perform salient object detection in optical RSIs. Specifically, we first combine the encoder’s low-level and high-level features (i.e., abundant local spatial and semantic information) via a feature-interaction operation, yielding boundary information. Then, the boundary cues are introduced into each decoder block, where the decoder features are directed to focus more on the boundary details and objects simultaneously. In this way, we can generate high-quality saliency maps which can highlight salient objects from optical RSIs completely and accurately. Extensive experiments are performed on a public dataset (i.e., ORSSD dataset), and the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our model when compared with the cutting-edge saliency models.