Salient Object Detection in the Distributed Cloud-Edge Intelligent Network

Intelligent network is crucial in the building of telecom networks because it utilizes artificial intelligent technologies to improve the performance. Salient object detection has increasingly attracted interest from intelligent network research since estimating human attention to objects is a crucial step in various surveillance applications. However, the computational-consuming and memory-consuming detection model is still less effective when it is deployed only either on the cloud or on the edge. In this article, we propose a specially-designed cloud-edge distributed framework for salient object detection based on the intelligent network. This framework can overcome the difficulty to transmit massive data in the cloud-only deployment scheme, as well as the difficulty to analyze massive data in the edge-only deployment scheme. However, the traditional cloud-edge distributed schemes are unsuitable to salient object detection task because of two challenges: 1) balance between the within-semantic knowledge and cross-semantic knowledge for the model training in different servers; 2) contradiction between extracting the semantic knowledge with global contextual information and local detailed information. To tackle the first challenge, our framework enables a hierarchical information allocation strategy in the cloud. It can prompt the salient object detection model in the edge to learn more from the similar scenes or semantics with where the edge server is located, while preserving the generalization ability of the model in the different scenes. To address the second challenge, our framework proposes a novel pyramidal deep learning model. It can effectively capture the global contextual features of the salient object, while preserving its local detailed features. The extensive experiments performed on six commonly- used public datasets can demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework and its superiority to 11 state-of-the-art approaches.