LeNo: Adversarial Robust Salient Object Detection Networks with Learnable Noise

Pixel-wise prediction with deep neural network has become an effective paradigm for salient object detection (SOD) and achieved remarkable performance. However, very few SOD models are robust against adversarial attacks which are visually imperceptible for human visual attention. The previous work robust saliency (ROSA) shuffles the pre-segmented superpixels and then refines the coarse saliency map by the densely connected conditional random field (CRF). Different from ROSA that rely on various pre- and post-processings, this paper proposes a light-weight Learnable Noise (LeNo) to defend adversarial attacks for SOD models. LeNo preserves accuracy of SOD models on both adversarial and clean images, as well as inference speed. In general, LeNo consists of a simple shallow noise and noise estimation that embedded in the encoder and decoder of arbitrary SOD networks respectively. Inspired by the center prior of human visual attention mechanism, we initialize the shallow noise with a cross-shaped gaussian distribution for better defense against adversarial attacks. Instead of adding additional network components for post-processing, the proposed noise estimation modifies only one channel of the decoder. With the deeply-supervised noise-decoupled training on state-of-the-art RGB and RGB-D SOD networks, LeNo outperforms previous works not only on adversarial images but also on clean images, which contributes stronger robustness for SOD. Our code is available at https://github.com/ssecv/LeNo.