Segment, Magnify and Reiterate: Detecting Camouflaged Objects the Hard Way

Qi Jia, Shuilian Yao, Yu Liu, Xin Fan, Risheng Liu, Zhongxuan Luo; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2022, pp. 4713-4722

It is challenging to accurately detect camouflaged objects from their highly similar surroundings. Existing methods mainly leverage a single-stage detection fashion, while neglecting small objects with low-resolution fine edges requires more operations than the larger ones. To tackle camouflaged object detection (COD), we are inspired by humans attention coupled with the coarse-to-fine detection strategy, and thereby propose an iterative refinement framework, coined SegMaR, which integrates Segment, Magnify and Reiterate in a multi-stage detection fashion. Specifically, we design a new discriminative mask which makes the model attend on the fixation and edge regions. In addition, we leverage an attention-based sampler to magnify the object region progressively with no need of enlarging the image size. Extensive experiments show our SegMaR achieves remarkable and consistent improvements over other state-of-the-art methods. Especially, we surpass two competitive methods 7.4% and 20.0% respectively in average over standard evaluation metrics on small camouflaged objects. Additional studies provide more promising insights into SegMaR, including its effectiveness on the discriminative mask and its generalization to other network architectures.