Multi-Source Uncertainty Mining for Deep Unsupervised Saliency Detection

Deep learning-based image salient object detection (SOD) heavily relies on large-scale training data with pixel-wise labeling. High-quality labels involve intensive labor and are expensive to acquire. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-source uncertainty mining method to facilitate unsupervised deep learning from multiple noisy labels generated by traditional handcrafted SOD methods. We design an Uncertainty Mining Network (UMNet) which consists of multiple Merge-and-Split (MS) modules to recursively analyze the commonality and difference among multiple noisy labels and infer pixel-wise uncertainty map for each label. Meanwhile, we model the noisy labels using Gibbs distribution and propose a weighted uncertainty loss to jointly train the UMNet with the SOD network. As a consequence, our UMNet can adaptively select reliable labels for SOD network learning. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method not only outperforms existing unsupervised methods, but also is on par with fully-supervised state-of-the-art models.