ADNet: An Asymmetric Dual-Stream Network for RGB-T Salient Object Detection

RGB-Thermal salient object detection (RGB-T SOD) aims to locate salient objects in images that include both RGB and thermal information. Previous approaches often suggest designing a symmetric network structure to tackle the challenge of dealing with low-quality RGB or thermal images. However, we contend that RGB and thermal modalities possess different numbers of channels and disparities in information density. In this paper, we propose a novel asymmetric dual-stream network (ADNet). Specifically, we leverage an asymmetric backbone to extract four stages of RGB features and four stages of thermal features. To enable effective interaction among low-level features in the first two stages, we introduce the Channel-Spatial Interaction (CSI) module. In the last two stages, deep features are enhanced using the Self-Attention Enhancement (SAE) module. Experimental results on the VT5000, VT1000, and VT821 datasets attest to the superior performance of our proposed ADNet compared to state-of-the-art methods.