CGFNet: Cross-Guided Fusion Network for RGB-T Salient Object Detection

RGB salient object detection (SOD) has made great progress. However, the performance of this single-modal salient object detection will be significantly decreased when encountering some challenging scenes, such as low light or darkness. To deal with the above challenges, thermal infrared (T) image is introduced into the salient object detection. This fused modal is called RGB-T salient object detection. To achieve deep mining of the unique characteristics of single modal and the full integration of cross-modality information, a novel Cross-Guided Fusion Network (CGFNet) for RGB-T salient object detection is proposed. Specifically, a Cross-Scale Alternate Guiding Fusion (CSAGF) module is proposed to mine the high-level semantic information and provide global context support. Subsequently, we design a Guidance Fusion Module (GFM) to achieve sufficient cross-modality fusion by using single modal as the main guidance and the other modal as auxiliary. Finally, the Cross-Guided Fusion Module (CGFM) is presented and serves as the main decoding block. And each decoding block is consists of two parts with two modalities information of each being the main guidance, i.e., cross-shared Cross-Level Enhancement (CLE) and Global Auxiliary Enhancement (GAE). The main difference between the two parts is that the GFM using different modalities as the main guide. The comprehensive experimental results prove that our method achieves better performance than the state-of-the-art salient detection methods. The source code has released at: https://github.com/wangjie0825/CGFNet.git.