BBS-Net: RGB-D Salient Object Detection with a Bifurcated Backbone Strategy Network

Multi-level feature fusion is a fundamental topic in computer vision for detecting, segmenting, and classifying objects at various scales. When multi-level features meet multi-modal cues, the optimal fusion problem becomes a hot potato. In this paper, we make the first attempt to leverage the inherent multi-modal and multi-level nature of RGB-D salient object detection to develop a novel cascaded refinement network. In particular, we 1) propose a bifurcated backbone strategy (BBS) to split the multi-level features into teacher and student features, and 2) utilize a depth-enhanced module (DEM) to excavate informative parts of depth cues from the channel and spatial views. This fuses RGB and depth modalities in a complementary way. Our simple yet efficient architecture, dubbed Bifurcated Backbone Strategy Network (BBS-Net), is backbone independent, runs in real-time (48 fps), and significantly outperforms 18 SOTAs on seven challenging datasets using four metrics.