Attenuative Unified U-Net with Conditional PatchMatch Algorithm for Edge Preserving Salient Object Detection

The rise of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) has significantly boosted salient object detection in computer vision tasks. However, downsampling methods like striding and pooling often introduce bluish artifacts near edges, hindering detection accuracy. To address this, the "Attenuative Unified U-Net with Conditional PatchMatch Algorithm" is proposed. The method employs Gaussian smoothing for noise reduction and depth refinement in preprocessing. In existing methods, the Edge-preserving salient object detection struggles with cluttered backgrounds and connected objects, like a bird on a rock, making it difficult to accurately distinguish edges and salient regions due to shared boundaries. Hence, an Attenuative Unified Backpropagated Entropy UNet is proposed, which integrates an Attention Mechanism that enhance feature map spatial weight assignment, emphasizing features or regions that are judged most relevant for edge and salient region detection. Then, the Cascaded Laplace pyramid is incorporated into the Unified U-Net’s design for multi-scale information processing, capturing contextual details effectively. The Backpropagated Entropy Loss Function is then created to ensure accurate and confident fused image output. The depth map, edge map, and salient area map are combined in the U-Net’s final output layer to create an overall fused image. Next, to addresses depth discontinuity problem a noteworthy novel idea the Conditional PatchMatch Random Field Algorithm (CPMRF), which combines PatchMatch efficiency and CRFs’ contextual modeling. PatchMatch iteratively propagates matches from neighboring patches to find similar patches in the remaining portion of the image and Conditional Random Field (CRF) is the next step, which improves the PatchMatch results by taking into account the connections between the matched patches and their neighboring areas. Hence, the experimental outcomes of the proposed model effectively show the improved detection of edge in salient object detection with better accuracy, precision, recall, MaxF, and F1 score with minimized MAE.