Dual cross-enhancement network for highly accurate dichotomous image segmentation

The existing image segmentation tasks mainly focus on segmenting objects with specific characteristics, such as salient, camouflaged, and meticulous objects, etc. However, the research of highly accurate Dichotomous Image Segmentation (DIS) combining these tasks has just started and still faces problems such as insufficient information interaction between layers and incomplete integration of high-level semantic information and low-level detailed features. In this paper, a new dual cross-enhancement network (DCENet) for highly accurate DIS is proposed, which mainly consists of two new modules: a cross-scaling guidance (CSG) module and a semantic cross-transplantation (SCT) module. Specifically, the CSG module adopts the adjacent-layer cross-scaling guidance method, which can efficiently interact with the multi-scale features of the adjacent layers extracted; the SCT module uses dual-branch features to complement each other. Moreover, in the way of transplantation, the high-level semantic information of the low-resolution branch is used to guide the low-level detail features of the high-resolution branch, and the features of different resolution branches are effectively fused. Finally, experimental results on the challenging DIS5K benchmark dataset show that the proposed network outperforms the 9 state-of-the-art (SOTA) networks in 5 widely used evaluation metrics. In addition, the ablation experiments also demonstrate the effectiveness of the cross-scaling guidance module and the semantic cross-transplantation module.