# Synthesize Boundaries: A Boundary-aware Self-consistent Framework for Weakly Supervised Salient Object Detection

Source: [Synthesize Boundaries: A Boundary-aware Self-consistent Framework for Weakly Supervised Salient Object Detection](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/68fa76581e209131cea6c808>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2025-10-26T03:51:28.908Z

Authors: Binwei Xu, Haoran Liang, Ronghua Liang, Peng Chen

Published: 2022-12-04T08:22:45.000Z

## Abstract

Fully supervised salient object detection (SOD) has made considerable progress based on expensive and time-consuming data with pixel-wise annotations. Recently, to relieve the labeling burden while maintaining performance, some scribble-based SOD methods have been proposed. However, learning precise boundary details from scribble annotations that lack edge information is still difficult. In this paper, we propose to learn precise boundaries from our designed synthetic images and labels without introducing any extra auxiliary data. The synthetic image creates boundary information by inserting synthetic concave regions that simulate the real concave regions of salient objects. Furthermore, we propose a novel self-consistent framework that consists of a global integral branch (GIB) and a boundary-aware branch (BAB) to train a saliency detector. GIB aims to identify integral salient objects, whose input is the original image. BAB aims to help predict accurate boundaries, whose input is the synthetic image. These two branches are connected through a self-consistent loss to guide the saliency detector to predict precise boundaries while identifying salient objects. Experimental results on five benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art weakly supervised SOD methods and further narrows the gap with the fully supervised methods.

## Recorded benchmark results

A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage.

## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.01764>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/2212.01764.pdf>)
