Although remarkable progress has been made in salient object detection (SOD) in natural scene images (NSI), the SOD of optical remote sensing images (RSI) still faces significant challenges due to various spatial resolutions, cluttered backgrounds, and complex imaging conditions, mainly for two reasons: (1) accurate location of salient objects; and (2) subtle boundaries of salient objects. This paper explores the inherent properties of multi-level features to develop a novel semantic-guided attention refinement network (SARNet) for SOD of NSI. Specifically, the proposed semantic guided decoder (SGD) roughly but accurately locates the multi-scale object by aggregating multiple high-level features, and then this global semantic information guides the integration of subsequent features in a step-by-step feedback manner to make full use of deep multi-level features. Simultaneously, the proposed parallel attention fusion (PAF) module combines cross-level features and semantic-guided information to refine the object’s boundary and highlight the entire object area gradually. Finally, the proposed network architecture is trained through an end-to-end fully supervised model. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations on two public RSI datasets and additional NSI datasets across five metrics show that our SARNet is superior to 14 state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods without any post-processing.

Display color line defect detection is an important step in the production quality inspection process. In order to improve the detection accuracy of low contrast line defects, we propose a display line defect detection method based on color feature fusion. The color saliency channels in the RG|GR and BY|YB channels were obtained using the relative entropy maximum criterion. Then, RG|GR were combined with the a channel and BY|YB with the b channel to calculate the red-green and the blue-yellow color fusion maps. The fusion color saliency map of the red-green and the blue-yellow color fusion maps was obtained by color feature fusion. Finally, the segmentation threshold was calculated according to the mean and standard deviation of the fusion color saliency map. The fused color saliency map was binarized and segmented to obtain a binary map of color line defects. The experimental results show that for the detection of multi-background offline defects, the detection accuracy of the algorithm in this paper is better than 90%, while other mainstreams fail to detect. Compared with state-of-the-art saliency detection algorithms, our method is capable of real-time low-contrast line defect detection.

To address the issue of low detection accuracy caused by low contrast in color Mura defects, this paper proposes a color Mura defect detection method based on channel contrast sensitivity function (CSF) filtering. The RGB image of the captured liquid crystal display (LCD) display is converted to the Lab color space, and the Weber contrast feature maps of the Lab channel images are calculated. Frequency domain filtering is performed using the CSF to obtain visually sensitive Lab feature maps. Color Mura defect detection is achieved by employing adaptive segmentation thresholds based on the fused feature maps of the L channel and ab channels. The color Mura evaluation criterion is utilized to quantitatively assess the defect detection results. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves an accuracy rate of 87% in color Mura defect detection, outperforming existing mainstream detection methods.

Display crosstalk defect detection is an important link in the display quality inspection process. We propose a crosstalk defect detection method based on salient color channel frequency domain filtering. Firstly, the salient color channel in RGBY is selected by the maximum relative entropy criterion, and the color quaternion matrix of the displayed image is formed with the Lab color space. Secondly, the image color quaternion matrix is converted into the logarithmic spectrum in the frequency domain through the hyper-complex Fourier transform. Finally, Gaussian threshold band-pass filtering and hyper-complex inverse Fourier transform are used to separate the low-contrast defects and background of the display image. The experimental results show that the accuracy of the proposed algorithm reaches 96% for a variety of crosstalk defect detection. Compared with the current advanced defect detection algorithms, the effectiveness of the proposed method for low-contrast crosstalk defect detection is confirmed.

Existing nighttime visibility enhancement methods primarily focus on improving overall brightness under low-light conditions. However, nighttime road images are also affected by glare, glow, and flare from complex light sources such as streetlights and headlights, making it challenging to suppress locally overexposed regions and recover fine details. To address these challenges, we propose a Nighttime Road Glare Suppression Network (NRGS-Net) for glare removal and detail restoration. Specifically, to handle diverse glare disturbances caused by the uncertainty in light source positions and shapes, we designed a gated positional attention (GPA) module that integrates positional encoding with local contextual information to guide the network in accurately locating and suppressing glare regions, thereby enhancing the visibility of affected areas. Furthermore, we introduced an improved Uformer backbone named LCAtransformer, in which the downsampling layers adopt efficient depthwise separable convolutions to reduce computational cost while preserving critical spatial information. The upsampling layers incorporate a residual PixelShuffle module to achieve effective restoration in glare-affected regions. Additionally, channel attention is introduced within the Local Context-Aware Feed-Forward Network (LCA-FFN) to enable adaptive adjustment of feature weights, effectively suppressing irrelevant and interfering features. To advance the research in nighttime glare suppression, we constructed and publicly released the Night Road Glare Dataset (NRGD) captured in real nighttime road scenarios, enriching the evaluation system for this task. Experiments conducted on the Flare7K++ and NRGD, using five evaluation metrics and comparing six state-of-the-art methods, demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance in both subjective and objective metrics compared to existing advanced methods.

Display color point defect detection is an important link in the display quality inspection process. To improve the detection accuracy of color point defects, a color point defect detection method based on color salient features is proposed. Color point defects that conform to the perception of the human vision are used as the key point for detection. First, the human visual perception constraint coefficient is used to correct the RGB three-channel image to obtain the color-channel-transformed image. Then, the local contrast method is used to extract the point features of the color channel, which achieves point defect enhancement, noise and background suppression. Finally, the mean and standard deviation of the defect feature maps of R, G, and B channels are calculated. The maximum mean and standard deviation are selected as thresholds using the maximum fusion criterion to perform binarization segmentation of the defect feature maps of R, G, and B channels. An OR operation was performed on the segmented images and the point defect segmentation results were combined. The experimental results show that the average detection accuracy and recall of the algorithm is higher than 94%, which is a significant improvement compared with mainstream detection methods and meets the needs of industrial production.