CONDA: Condensed Deep Association Learning for Co-Salient Object Detection.

Inter-image association modeling is crucial for co-salient object detection. Despite the satisfactory performance, previous methods still have limitations on sufficient inter-image association modeling. This is because most of them focus on image feature optimization under the guidance of heuristically calculated raw inter-image associations. They directly rely on raw associations which are not reliable in complex scenarios and their image feature optimization approach is not explicit for inter-image association modeling. To alleviate these limitations, this paper propose a deep association learning strategy that deploy deep networks on raw associations to explicitly transform them into deep association features. Specifically, we first create hyperassociations to collect dense pixel-pair-wise raw associations and then deploys deep aggregation networks on them. We design a progressive association generation module for this purpose with additional enhancement of the hyperassociation calculation. More importantly, we propose a correspondence-induced association condensation module that introduces a pretext task, i.e. semantic correspondence estimation, to condense the hyperassociations for computational burden reduction and noise elimination. We also design an object-aware cycle consistency loss for high-quality correspondence estimations. Experimental results on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the remarkable effectiveness of our proposed method with various training settings.