  Detecting and segmenting salient objects from given image scenes has received
great attention in recent years. A fundamental challenge in training the
existing deep saliency detection models is the requirement of large amounts of
annotated data. While gathering large quantities of training data becomes cheap
and easy, annotating the data is an expensive process in terms of time, labor
and human expertise. To address this problem, this paper proposes to learn the
effective salient object detection model based on the manual annotation on a
few training images only, thus dramatically alleviating human labor in training
models. To this end, we name this task as the few-cost salient object detection
and propose an adversarial-paced learning (APL)-based framework to facilitate
the few-cost learning scenario. Essentially, APL is derived from the self-paced
learning (SPL) regime but it infers the robust learning pace through the
data-driven adversarial learning mechanism rather than the heuristic design of
the learning regularizer. Comprehensive experiments on four widely-used
benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed method can effectively
approach to the existing supervised deep salient object detection models with
only 1k human-annotated training images. The project page is available at
https://github.com/hb-stone/FC-SOD.
