Skip to main content
Log in

Camouflaged Object Detection with Adaptive Partition and Background Retrieval

  • Published:
Image International Journal of Computer Vision Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Recent works confirm the importance of local details for identifying camouflaged objects. However, how to identify the details around the target objects via background cues lacks in-depth study. In this paper, we take this into account and present a novel learning framework for camouflaged object detection, called AdaptCOD. To be specific, our method decouples the detection process into three parts, namely localization, segmentation, and retrieval. We design a context adaptive partition strategy to dynamically select a reasonable context region for local segmentation and a background retrieval module to further polish the camouflaged object boundaries. Despite the simplicity, our method enables even a simple COD model to achieve great performance. Extensive experiments show that AdaptCOD surpasses all existing state-of-the-art methods on three widely-used camouflaged object detection benchmarks. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/HVision-NKU/AdaptCOD.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Subscribe and save

Springer+
from $39.99 /Month
  • Starting from 10 chapters or articles per month
  • Access and download chapters and articles from more than 300k books and 2,500 journals
  • Cancel anytime
View plans

Buy Now

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Fig. 1
ImageThe alternative text for this image may have been generated using AI.
Fig. 2
ImageThe alternative text for this image may have been generated using AI.
Fig. 3
ImageThe alternative text for this image may have been generated using AI.
Fig. 4
ImageThe alternative text for this image may have been generated using AI.
Fig. 5
ImageThe alternative text for this image may have been generated using AI.
Fig. 6
ImageThe alternative text for this image may have been generated using AI.
Fig. 7
ImageThe alternative text for this image may have been generated using AI.
Fig. 8
ImageThe alternative text for this image may have been generated using AI.
Fig. 9
ImageThe alternative text for this image may have been generated using AI.
Fig. 10
ImageThe alternative text for this image may have been generated using AI.
Fig. 11
ImageThe alternative text for this image may have been generated using AI.

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  • Bernal, J., Sánchez, F. J., Fernández-Esparrach, G., Gil, D., Rodríguez, C., & Vilariño, F. (2015). Wm-dova maps for accurate polyp highlighting in colonoscopy: Validation vs. saliency maps from physicians. CMIG, 43, 99–111.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bernal, J., Sánchez, J., & Vilarino, F. (2012). Towards automatic polyp detection with a polyp appearance model. Pattern Recognition, 45(9), 3166–3182.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Chen, G., Liu, S. J., Sun, Y. J., Ji, G. P., Wu, Y. F., & Zhou, T. (2022). Camouflaged object detection via context-aware cross-level fusion. IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, 32(10), 6981–6993.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Cheng, X., Xiong, H., Fan, D.P., Zhong, Y., Harandi, M., Drummond, T., & Ge, Z. (2022). Implicit motion handling for video camouflaged object detection. In: CVPR

  • Chu, X., Tian, Z., Wang, Y., Zhang, B., Ren, H., Wei, X., Xia, H., Shen, C. (2021). Twins: Revisiting the design of spatial attention in vision transformers. In: NeurIPS

  • De Boer, P. T., Kroese, D. P., Mannor, S., & Rubinstein, R. Y. (2005). A tutorial on the cross-entropy method. Annals of operations research, 134(1), 19–67.

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  • Devlin, J., Chang, M.W., Lee, K., & Toutanova, K. (2018). Bert: Pre-training of deep bidirectional transformers for language understanding. In: NAACL

  • Fan, D.P., Cheng, M.M., Liu, Y., Li, T., & Borji, A. (2017). Structure-measure: A new way to evaluate foreground maps. In: IEEE ICCV

  • Fan, D.P., Gong, C., Cao, Y., Ren, B., Cheng, M.M., & Borji, A. (2018). Enhanced-alignment measure for binary foreground map evaluation. In: IJCAI

  • Fan, D. P., Ji, G. P., Cheng, M. M., & Shao, L. (2022). Concealed object detection. IEEE TPAMI, 44(10), 6024–6042.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fan, D.P., Ji, G.P., Sun, G., Cheng, M.M., Shen, J., & Shao, L. (2020). Camouflaged object detection. In: IEEE CVPR

  • Fan, D.P., Ji, G.P., Zhou, T., Chen, G., Fu, H., Shen, J., & Shao, L. (2020). Pranet: Parallel reverse attention network for polyp segmentation. In: MICCAI

  • Fan, D. P., Zhang, J., Xu, G., Cheng, M. M., & Shao, L. (2023). Salient objects in clutter. IEEE TPAMI, 45(2), 2344–2366.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Pérez-de la Fuente, R., Delclòs, X., Peñalver, E., Speranza, M., Wierzchos, J., Ascaso, C., & Engel, M. S. (2012). Early evolution and ecology of camouflage in insects. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109(52), 21414–21419.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Han, K., Xiao, A., Wu, E., Guo, J., Xu, C., & Wang, Y. (2021) Transformer in transformer. In: NeurIPS

  • He, C., Li, K., Zhang, Y., Tang, L., Zhang, Y., Guo, Z., & Li, X. (2023) Camouflaged object detection with feature decomposition and edge reconstruction. In: Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. pp. 22046–22055

  • He, R., Dong, Q., Lin, J., & Lau, R.W. (2023). Weakly-supervised camouflaged object detection with scribble annotations. In: AAAI

  • Hou, Q., Cheng, M. M., Hu, X., Borji, A., Tu, Z., & Torr, P. (2019). Deeply supervised salient object detection with short connections. IEEE TPAMI, 41(4), 815–828.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hu, X., Wang, S., Qin, X., Dai, H., Ren, W., Luo, D., Tai, Y., & Shao, L. (2023) High-resolution iterative feedback network for camouflaged object detection. In: AAAI

  • Huang, Z., Dai, H., Xiang, T.Z., Wang, S., Chen, H.X., Qin, J., & Xiong, H. (2023) Feature shrinkage pyramid for camouflaged object detection with transformers. In: Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. pp. 5557–5566

  • Jha, D., Smedsrud, P.H., Riegler, M.A., Halvorsen, P., Lange, T.d., Johansen, D., & Johansen, H.D. (2020) Kvasir-seg: A segmented polyp dataset. In: MMM

  • Ji, G. P., Fan, D. P., Chou, Y. C., Dai, D., Liniger, A., & Van Gool, L. (2022). Deep gradient learning for efficient camouflaged object detection. MIR. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11633-022-1365-9

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ji, G.P., Zhu, L., Zhuge, M., & Fu, K. (2022) Fast camouflaged object detection via edge-based reversible re-calibration network. PR 123, 108414

  • Jia, Q., Yao, S., Liu, Y., Fan, X., Liu, R., & Luo, Z. (2022). Segment, magnify and reiterate: Detecting camouflaged objects the hard way. In: IEEE CVPR

  • Lamdouar, H., Yang, C., Xie, W., & Zisserman, A. (2020) Betrayed by motion: Camouflaged object discovery via motion segmentation. In: ACCV

  • Le, T. N., Cao, Y., Nguyen, T. C., Le, M. Q., Nguyen, K. D., Do, T. T., Tran, M. T., & Nguyen, T. V. (2022). Camouflaged instance segmentation in-the-wild: Dataset, method, and benchmark suite. IEEE TIP, 31, 287–300.

    Google Scholar 

  • Le, T. N., Nguyen, T. V., Nie, Z., Tran, M. T., & Sugimoto, A. (2019). Anabranch network for camouflaged object segmentation. CVIU, 184, 45–56.

    Google Scholar 

  • Le, X., Mei, J., Zhang, H., Zhou, B., & Xi, J. (2020). A learning-based approach for surface defect detection using small image datasets. Neurocomputing

  • Li, A., Zhang, J., Lv, Y., Liu, B., Zhang, T., & Dai, Y. (2021) Uncertainty-aware joint salient object and camouflaged object detection. In: IEEE CVPR

  • Li, C., & Jiao, G. (2022). Einet: camouflaged object detection with pyramid vision transformer. JEI, 31(5), 053002.

    Google Scholar 

  • Li, Z.Y., Gao, S., & Cheng, M.M. (2022) Exploring feature self-relation for self-supervised transformer. arXiv preprint arXiv:2206.05184

  • Lin, J., Tan, X., Xu, K., Ma, L., & Lau, R. W. (2023). Frequency-aware camouflaged object detection. ACM TMCCA, 19(2), 1–16.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lin, T. Y., Dollár, P., Girshick, R., He, K., Hariharan, B., & Belongie, S. (2017) Feature pyramid networks for object detection. In: IEEE CVPR

  • Liu, Y., Cheng, M. M., Fan, D. P., Zhang, L., Bian, J. W., & Tao, D. (2022). Semantic edge detection with diverse deep supervision. International Journal of Computer Vision, 130(1), 179–198.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Liu, Z., Zhang, Z., & Wu, W. (2022) Boosting camouflaged object detection with dual-task interactive transformer. ICPR

  • Loshchilov, I., & Hutter, F. (2017) Sgdr: Stochastic gradient descent with warm restarts. ICLR

  • Lv, Y., Zhang, J., Dai, Y., Li, A., Barnes, N., & Fan, D. P. (2023) Towards deeper understanding of camouflaged object detection. IEEE TCSVT

  • Lv, Y., Zhang, J., Dai, Y., Li, A., Liu, B., Barnes, N., & Fan, D. P. (2021) Simultaneously localize, segment and rank the camouflaged objects. In: IEEE CVPR

  • Margolin, R., Zelnik-Manor, L., & Tal, A. (2014) How to evaluate foreground maps? In: IEEE CVPR

  • Máttyus, G., Luo, W., & Urtasun, R. (2017) Deeproadmapper: Extracting road topology from aerial images. In: IEEE ICCV

  • Mei, H., Ji, G.P., Wei, Z., Yang, X., Wei, X., & Fan, D. P. (2021) Camouflaged object segmentation with distraction mining. In: IEEE CVPR

  • Mei, H., Xu, K., Zhou, Y., Wang, Y., Piao, H., Wei, X., & Yang, X. (2023). Camouflaged object segmentation with omni perception. International Journal of Computer Vision, 131, 1–16.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mei, H., Yang, X., Zhou, Y., Ji, G.P., Wei, X., & Fan, D.P. (2023) Distraction-aware camouflaged object segmentation. SCIS

  • Mondal, A., Ghosh, S., & Ghosh, A. (2017). Partially camouflaged object tracking using modified probabilistic neural network and fuzzy energy based active contour. International Journal of Computer Vision, 122, 116–148.

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  • Pang, Y., Zhao, X., Xiang, T.Z., Zhang, L., & Lu, H. (2022) Zoom in and out: A mixed-scale triplet network for camouflaged object detection. In: IEEE CVPR

  • Paszke, A., Gross, S., Massa, F., Lerer, A., Bradbury, J., Chanan, G., Killeen, T., Lin, Z., Gimelshein, N., & Antiga, L., et al. (2019) Pytorch: An imperative style, high-performance deep learning library. In: NeurIPS

  • Perazzi, F., Krähenbühl, P., Pritch, Y., & Hornung, A. (2012) Saliency filters: Contrast based filtering for salient region detection. In: IEEE CVPR

  • Rahman, M. M., & Marculescu, R. (2023) Medical image segmentation via cascaded attention decoding. In: IEEE WACV

  • Ren, J., Hu, X., Zhu, L., Xu, X., Xu, Y., Wang, W., Deng, Z., & Heng, P. A. (2023). Deep texture-aware features for camouflaged object detection. IEEE TCSVT, 33(3), 1157–1167.

    Google Scholar 

  • Silva, J., Histace, A., Romain, O., Dray, X., & Granado, B. (2014). Toward embedded detection of polyps in wce images for early diagnosis of colorectal cancer. International Journal of Computer Assisted Radiology and Surgery, 9, 283–293.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Srinivas, A., Lin, T.Y., Parmar, N., Shlens, J., Abbeel, P., & Vaswani, A. (2021) Bottleneck transformers for visual recognition. In: IEEE CVPR

  • Sun, Y., Chen, G., Zhou, T., Zhang, Y., & Liu, N. (2021) Context-aware cross-level fusion network for camouflaged object detection. In: IJCAI

  • Sun, Y., Wang, S., Chen, C., & Xiang, T. Z. (2022) Boundary-guided camouflaged object detection. In: IJCAI

  • Tabernik, D., Šela, S., Skvarč, J., & Skočaj, D. (2020). Segmentation-based deep-learning approach for surface-defect detection. Journal of Intelligent Manufacturing, 31(3), 759–776.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Tajbakhsh, N., Gurudu, S. R., & Liang, J. (2015). Automated polyp detection in colonoscopy videos using shape and context information. IEEE TMI, 35(2), 630–644.

    Google Scholar 

  • Vaswani, A., Shazeer, N., Parmar, N., Uszkoreit, J., Jones, L., Gomez, A.N., Kaiser, Ł., & Polosukhin, I. (2017) Attention is all you need. In: NeurIPS

  • Wang, H., Wang, X., Sun, F., & Song, Y. (2021) Camouflaged object segmentation with transformer. In: ICCSIP

  • Wang, W., Xie, E., Li, X., Fan, D. P., Song, K., Liang, D., Lu, T., Luo, P., & Shao, L. (2022). Pvt v2: Improved baselines with pyramid vision transformer. CVMJ, 8(3), 415–424.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wu, F., Li, X., Zhang, Y., & Hu, K. (2022) Transcoop: Cooperation of transformers and cnns for camouflaged object segmentation. In: IEEE ICME

  • Wu, H., Xiao, B., Codella, N., Liu, M., Dai, X., Yuan, L., & Zhang, L. (2021) Cvt: Introducing convolutions to vision transformers. In: IEEE ICCV

  • Wu, M., Zhang, X., Sun, X., Zhou, Y., Chen, C., Gu, J., Sun, X., & Ji, R. (2022) Difnet: Boosting visual information flow for image captioning. In: Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. pp. 18020–18029

  • Xie, S., & Tu, Z. (2015) Holistically-nested edge detection. In: IEEE ICCV

  • Xu, B., Liang, H., Liang, R., & Chen, P. (2021) Locate globally, segment locally: A progressive architecture with knowledge review network for salient object detection. In: AAAI

  • Xu, W., Xu, Y., Chang, T., & Tu, Z. (2021) Co-scale conv-attentional image transformers. In: IEEE ICCV

  • Yang, F., Zhai, Q., Li, X., Huang, R., Luo, A., Cheng, H., & Fan, D. P. (2021) Uncertainty-guided transformer reasoning for camouflaged object detection. In: IEEE ICCV

  • Yang, J., Li, C., Zhang, P., Dai, X., Xiao, B., Yuan, L., & Gao, J. (2021) Focal attention for long-range interactions in vision transformers. In: NeurIPS

  • Yin, B., Zhang, X., Hou, Q., Sun, B. Y., Fan, D. P., & Van Gool, L. (2022) Camoformer: Masked separable attention for camouflaged object detection. arXiv preprint arXiv:2212.06570

  • Zhai, Q., Li, X., Yang, F., Chen, C., Cheng, H., & Fan, D. P. (2021) Mutual graph learning for camouflaged object detection. In: CVPR

  • Zhai, Q., Li, X., Yang, F., Jiao, Z., Luo, P., Cheng, H., & Liu, Z. (2023). Mgl: Mutual graph learning for camouflaged object detection. IEEE TIP, 32, 1897–1910.

    Google Scholar 

  • Zhai, W., Cao, Y., Xie, H., & Zha, Z. J. (2022) Deep texton-coherence network for camouflaged object detection. IEEE TMM

  • Zhang, M., Xu, S., Piao, Y., Shi, D., Lin, S., & Lu, H. (2022) Preynet: Preying on camouflaged objects. In: ACM MM

  • Zhang, Q., Ge, Y., Zhang, C., & Bi, H. (2022) Tprnet: camouflaged object detection via transformer-induced progressive refinement network. TVCJ pp. 1–15

  • Zhang, X., Sun, X., Luo, Y., Ji, J., Zhou, Y., Wu, Y., Huang, F., & Ji, R. (2021) Rstnet: Captioning with adaptive attention on visual and non-visual words. In: Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF conference on computer vision and pattern recognition. pp. 15465–15474

  • Zheng, D., Zheng, X., Yang, L.T., Gao, Y., Zhu, C., & Ruan, Y. (2023) Mffn: Multi-view feature fusion network for camouflaged object detection. In: WACV

  • Zheng, H., Fu, J., Zha, Z.J., & Luo, J. (2019) Looking for the devil in the details: Learning trilinear attention sampling network for fine-grained image recognition. In: IEEE CVPR

  • Zhong, Y., Li, B., Tang, L., Kuang, S., Wu, S., & Ding, S. (2022) Detecting camouflaged object in frequency domain. In: IEEE CVPR

  • Zhou, Y., Li, Z., Guo, C. L., Bai, S., Cheng, M. M., & Hou, Q. (2023) Srformer: Permuted self-attention for single image super-resolution. In: ICCV

  • Zhu, H., Li, P., Xie, H., Yan, X., Liang, D., Chen, D., Wei, M., & Qin, J. (2022) I can find you! boundary-guided separated attention network for camouflaged object detection. In: AAAI

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Li Liu or Qibin Hou.

Additional information

Communicated by Diane Larlus.

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Yin, B., Zhang, X., Liu, L. et al. Camouflaged Object Detection with Adaptive Partition and Background Retrieval. Int J Comput Vis 133, 4877–4893 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11263-025-02406-6

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Version of record:

  • Issue date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11263-025-02406-6

Keywords

Profiles

  1. Qibin Hou