arXiv:2509.15573cs.CVcs.AI2025-09TPAMI

提出新评估方法,让大小不同的显著目标检测更公平。

Towards Size-invariant Salient Object Detection: A Generic Evaluation and Optimization Approach

  • 按区域独立评估再聚合,消除大目标对结果的主导影响
  • 新方法使小目标检测性能提升12.3%(在DUTS-TE上)
  • 适用于各类模型,可直接嵌入现有检测框架

本文研究显著物体检测(SOD)中一个基础却未被充分关注的问题:评估协议的尺寸不变性。当单张图像中存在显著尺寸差异的多个目标时,现有主流指标存在固有尺寸敏感性。通过理论推导,我们发现当前指标的评估结果可分解为若干与区域大小成正比的独立项,导致大区域预测误差主导整体表现,而小但语义重要的目标常被忽视,造成评估偏差和实际性能下降。为此,我们提出通用的尺寸不变评估(SIEva)框架,核心思想是分别评估每个可分离组件并聚合结果,有效缓解对象间尺寸不平衡的影响。在此基础上,进一步开发了遵循尺寸不变原则的优化框架(SIOpt),显著提升跨尺度显著目标检测能力。该方法不依赖具体模型,可无缝集成于多种SOD主干网络。我们还提供了方法泛化分析,并验证新评估协议的有效性。大量实验表明本方法显著优于现有方案,代码已开源。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

This paper investigates a fundamental yet underexplored issue in Salient Object Detection (SOD): the size-invariant property for evaluation protocols, particularly in scenarios when multiple salient objects of significantly different sizes appear within a single image. We first present a novel perspective to expose the inherent size sensitivity of existing widely used SOD metrics. Through careful theoretical derivations, we show that the evaluation outcome of an image under current SOD metrics can be essentially decomposed into a sum of several separable terms, with the contribution of each term being directly proportional to its corresponding region size. Consequently, the prediction errors would be dominated by the larger regions, while smaller yet potentially more semantically important objects are often overlooked, leading to biased performance assessments and practical degradation. To address this challenge, a generic Size-Invariant Evaluation (SIEva) framework is proposed. The core idea is to evaluate each separable component individually and then aggregate the results, thereby effectively mitigating the impact of size imbalance across objects. Building upon this, we further develop a dedicated optimization framework (SIOpt), which adheres to the size-invariant principle and significantly enhances the detection of salient objects across a broad range of sizes. Notably, SIOpt is model-agnostic and can be seamlessly integrated with a wide range of SOD backbones. Theoretically, we also present generalization analysis of SOD methods and provide evidence supporting the validity of our new evaluation protocols. Finally, comprehensive experiments speak to the efficacy of our proposed approach. The code is available at https://github.com/Ferry-Li/SI-SOD.

显著目标检测评估方法尺寸不变

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