WGI-Net: A weighted group integration network for RGB-D salient object detection

Salient object detection is used as a pre-process in many computer vision tasks (such as salient object segmentation, video salient object detection, etc.). When performing salient object detection, depth information can provide clues to the location of target objects, so effective fusion of RGB and depth feature information is important. In this paper, we propose a new feature information aggregation approach, weighted group integration (WGI), to effectively integrate RGB and depth feature information. We use a dual-branch structure to slice the input RGB image and depth map separately and then merge the results separately by concatenation. As grouped features may lose global information about the target object, we also make use of the idea of residual learning, taking the features captured by the original fusion method as supplementary information to ensure both accuracy and completeness of the fused information. Experiments on five datasets show that our model performs better than typical existing approaches for four evaluation metrics.