Uncertainty-Masked Bernoulli Diffusion for Camouflaged Object Detection Refinement

Camouflaged Object Detection (COD) presents inherent challenges due to the subtle visual differences between targets and their backgrounds. While existing methods have made notable progress, there remains significant potential for post-processing refinement that has yet to be fully explored. To address this limitation, we propose the Uncertainty-Masked Bernoulli Diffusion (UMBD) model, the first generative refinement framework specifically designed for COD. UMBD introduces an uncertainty-guided masking mechanism that selectively applies Bernoulli diffusion to residual regions with poor segmentation quality, enabling targeted refinement while preserving correctly segmented areas. To support this process, we design the Hybrid Uncertainty Quantification Network (HUQNet), which employs a multi-branch architecture and fuses uncertainty from multiple sources to improve estimation accuracy. This enables adaptive guidance during the generative sampling process. The proposed UMBD framework can be seamlessly integrated with a wide range of existing Encoder-Decoder-based COD models, combining their discriminative capabilities with the generative advantages of diffusion-based refinement. Extensive experiments across multiple COD benchmarks demonstrate consistent performance improvements, achieving average gains of 5.5% in MAE and 3.2% in weighted F-measure with only modest computational overhead. Code will be released.

Segment Concealed Objects with Incomplete Supervision

Incompletely-Supervised Concealed Object Segmentation (ISCOS) involves segmenting objects that seamlessly blend into their surrounding environments, utilizing incompletely annotated data, such as weak and semi-annotations, for model training. This task remains highly challenging due to (1) the limited supervision provided by the incompletely annotated training data, and (2) the difficulty of distinguishing concealed objects from the background, which arises from the intrinsic similarities in concealed scenarios. In this paper, we introduce the first unified method for ISCOS to address these challenges. To tackle the issue of incomplete supervision, we propose a unified mean-teacher framework, SEE, that leverages the vision foundation model, ``\emph{Segment Anything Model (SAM)}'', to generate pseudo-labels using coarse masks produced by the teacher model as prompts. To mitigate the effect of low-quality segmentation masks, we introduce a series of strategies for pseudo-label generation, storage, and supervision. These strategies aim to produce informative pseudo-labels, store the best pseudo-labels generated, and select the most reliable components to guide the student model, thereby ensuring robust network training. Additionally, to tackle the issue of intrinsic similarity, we design a hybrid-granularity feature grouping module that groups features at different granularities and aggregates these results. By clustering similar features, this module promotes segmentation coherence, facilitating more complete segmentation for both single-object and multiple-object images. We validate the effectiveness of our approach across multiple ISCOS tasks, and experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance. Furthermore, SEE can serve as a plug-and-play solution, enhancing the performance of existing models.

CGCOD: Class-Guided Camouflaged Object Detection

Camouflaged Object Detection (COD) is designed to identify objects that blend seamlessly with their surroundings. Due to the complexity of camouflaged objects (such as shape, color, and texture), their semantic cues are often blurred or completely lost, posing a significant challenge for COD. Existing COD methods often rely on visual features, which are not stable enough in changeable camouflage environments. This instability leads to false positives and false negatives, resulting in incomplete or inaccurate segmentation results. In this paper, to solve this problem, we propose a new task, Class-Guided Camouflaged Object Detection (CG-COD), which extends the traditional COD task by introducing object class knowledge, significantly improving the robustness and segmentation accuracy of the model in complex environments. Toward this end, we construct a dataset, CamoClass, containing the camouflaged objects in the real scenes and their corresponding class annotation. Based on this, we propose a multi-stage framework CGNet which consists of a plug-and-play class prompt generator and a class-guided detector. Under the guidance of textual information, CGNet enables efficient segmentation. It is worth emphasizing that for the first time, we extend the object class annotations on existing COD benchmark datasets, and introduce a flexible framework to improve the performance of the existing COD model under text guidance.

Inspiring the Next Generation of Segment Anything Models: Comprehensively Evaluate SAM and SAM 2 with Diverse Prompts Towards Context-Dependent Concepts under Different Scenes

As a foundational model, SAM has significantly influenced multiple fields within computer vision, and its upgraded version, SAM 2, enhances capabilities in video segmentation, poised to make a substantial impact once again. While SAMs (SAM and SAM 2) have demonstrated excellent performance in segmenting context-independent concepts like people, cars, and roads, they overlook more challenging context-dependent (CD) concepts, such as visual saliency, camouflage, product defects, and medical lesions. CD concepts rely heavily on global and local contextual information, making them susceptible to shifts in different contexts, which requires strong discriminative capabilities from the model. The lack of comprehensive evaluation of SAMs limits understanding of their performance boundaries, which may hinder the design of future models. In this paper, we conduct a thorough quantitative evaluation of SAMs on 11 CD concepts across 2D and 3D images and videos in various visual modalities within natural, medical, and industrial scenes. We develop a unified evaluation framework for SAM and SAM 2 that supports manual, automatic, and intermediate self-prompting, aided by our specific prompt generation and interaction strategies. We further explore the potential of SAM 2 for in-context learning and introduce prompt robustness testing to simulate real-world imperfect prompts. Finally, we analyze the benefits and limitations of SAMs in understanding CD concepts and discuss their future development in segmentation tasks. This work aims to provide valuable insights to guide future research in both context-independent and context-dependent concepts segmentation, potentially informing the development of the next version - SAM 3.

Beyond Mask: Rethinking Guidance Types in Few-shot Segmentation

Existing few-shot segmentation (FSS) methods mainly focus on prototype feature generation and the query-support matching mechanism. As a crucial prompt for generating prototype features, the pair of image-mask types in the support set has become the default setting. However, various types such as image, text, box, and mask all can provide valuable information regarding the objects in context, class, localization, and shape appearance. Existing work focuses on specific combinations of guidance, leading FSS into different research branches. Rethinking guidance types in FSS is expected to explore the efficient joint representation of the coupling between the support set and query set, giving rise to research trends in the weakly or strongly annotated guidance to meet the customized requirements of practical users. In this work, we provide the generalized FSS with seven guidance paradigms and develop a universal vision-language framework (UniFSS) to integrate prompts from text, mask, box, and image. Leveraging the advantages of large-scale pre-training vision-language models in textual and visual embeddings, UniFSS proposes high-level spatial correction and embedding interactive units to overcome the semantic ambiguity drawbacks typically encountered by pure visual matching methods when facing intra-class appearance diversities. Extensive experiments show that UniFSS significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. Notably, the weakly annotated class-aware box paradigm even surpasses the finely annotated mask paradigm.

Spider: A Unified Framework for Context-dependent Concept Understanding

Different from the context-independent (CI) concepts such as human, car, and airplane, context-dependent (CD) concepts require higher visual understanding ability, such as camouflaged object and medical lesion. Despite the rapid advance of many CD understanding tasks in respective branches, the isolated evolution leads to their limited cross-domain generalisation and repetitive technique innovation. Since there is a strong coupling relationship between foreground and background context in CD tasks, existing methods require to train separate models in their focused domains. This restricts their real-world CD concept understanding towards artificial general intelligence (AGI). We propose a unified model with a single set of parameters, Spider, which only needs to be trained once. With the help of the proposed concept filter driven by the image-mask group prompt, Spider is able to understand and distinguish diverse strong context-dependent concepts to accurately capture the Prompter's intention. Without bells and whistles, Spider significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art specialized models in 8 different context-dependent segmentation tasks, including 4 natural scenes (salient, camouflaged, and transparent objects and shadow) and 4 medical lesions (COVID-19, polyp, breast, and skin lesion with color colonoscopy, CT, ultrasound, and dermoscopy modalities). Besides, Spider shows obvious advantages in continuous learning. It can easily complete the training of new tasks by fine-tuning parameters less than 1\% and bring a tolerable performance degradation of less than 5\% for all old tasks. The source code will be publicly available at \href{https://github.com/Xiaoqi-Zhao-DLUT/Spider-UniCDSeg}{Spider-UniCDSeg}.

Multi-view Aggregation Network for Dichotomous Image Segmentation

Dichotomous Image Segmentation (DIS) has recently emerged towards high-precision object segmentation from high-resolution natural images. When designing an effective DIS model, the main challenge is how to balance the semantic dispersion of high-resolution targets in the small receptive field and the loss of high-precision details in the large receptive field. Existing methods rely on tedious multiple encoder-decoder streams and stages to gradually complete the global localization and local refinement. Human visual system captures regions of interest by observing them from multiple views. Inspired by it, we model DIS as a multi-view object perception problem and provide a parsimonious multi-view aggregation network (MVANet), which unifies the feature fusion of the distant view and close-up view into a single stream with one encoder-decoder structure. With the help of the proposed multi-view complementary localization and refinement modules, our approach established long-range, profound visual interactions across multiple views, allowing the features of the detailed close-up view to focus on highly slender structures.Experiments on the popular DIS-5K dataset show that our MVANet significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both accuracy and speed. The source code and datasets will be publicly available at \href{https://github.com/qianyu-dlut/MVANet}{MVANet}.

Towards Automatic Power Battery Detection: New Challenge, Benchmark Dataset and Baseline

We conduct a comprehensive study on a new task named power battery detection (PBD), which aims to localize the dense cathode and anode plates endpoints from X-ray images to evaluate the quality of power batteries. Existing manufacturers usually rely on human eye observation to complete PBD, which makes it difficult to balance the accuracy and efficiency of detection. To address this issue and drive more attention into this meaningful task, we first elaborately collect a dataset, called X-ray PBD, which has $1,500$ diverse X-ray images selected from thousands of power batteries of $5$ manufacturers, with $7$ different visual interference. Then, we propose a novel segmentation-based solution for PBD, termed multi-dimensional collaborative network (MDCNet). With the help of line and counting predictors, the representation of the point segmentation branch can be improved at both semantic and detail aspects. Besides, we design an effective distance-adaptive mask generation strategy, which can alleviate the visual challenge caused by the inconsistent distribution density of plates to provide MDCNet with stable supervision. Without any bells and whistles, our segmentation-based MDCNet consistently outperforms various other corner detection, crowd counting and general/tiny object detection-based solutions, making it a strong baseline that can help facilitate future research in PBD. Finally, we share some potential difficulties and works for future researches. The source code and datasets will be publicly available at \href{http://www.gy3000.company/x3000%e5%bc%80%e6%94%be%e5%b9%b3%e5%8f%b0}{X-ray PBD}.

Open-Vocabulary Camouflaged Object Segmentation

Recently, the emergence of the large-scale vision-language model (VLM), such as CLIP, has opened the way towards open-world object perception. Many works has explored the utilization of pre-trained VLM for the challenging open-vocabulary dense prediction task that requires perceive diverse objects with novel classes at inference time. Existing methods construct experiments based on the public datasets of related tasks, which are not tailored for open vocabulary and rarely involves imperceptible objects camouflaged in complex scenes due to data collection bias and annotation costs. To fill in the gaps, we introduce a new task, open-vocabulary camouflaged object segmentation (OVCOS) and construct a large-scale complex scene dataset (\textbf{OVCamo}) which containing 11,483 hand-selected images with fine annotations and corresponding object classes. Further, we build a strong single-stage open-vocabulary \underline{c}amouflaged \underline{o}bject \underline{s}egmentation transform\underline{er} baseline \textbf{OVCoser} attached to the parameter-fixed CLIP with iterative semantic guidance and structure enhancement. By integrating the guidance of class semantic knowledge and the supplement of visual structure cues from the edge and depth information, the proposed method can efficiently capture camouflaged objects. Moreover, this effective framework also surpasses previous state-of-the-arts of open-vocabulary semantic image segmentation by a large margin on our OVCamo dataset. With the proposed dataset and baseline, we hope that this new task with more practical value can further expand the research on open-vocabulary dense prediction tasks.

ZoomNeXt: A Unified Collaborative Pyramid Network for Camouflaged Object Detection

Recent camouflaged object detection (COD) attempts to segment objects visually blended into their surroundings, which is extremely complex and difficult in real-world scenarios. Apart from the high intrinsic similarity between camouflaged objects and their background, objects are usually diverse in scale, fuzzy in appearance, and even severely occluded. To this end, we propose an effective unified collaborative pyramid network which mimics human behavior when observing vague images and videos, \textit{i.e.}, zooming in and out. Specifically, our approach employs the zooming strategy to learn discriminative mixed-scale semantics by the multi-head scale integration and rich granularity perception units, which are designed to fully explore imperceptible clues between candidate objects and background surroundings. The former's intrinsic multi-head aggregation provides more diverse visual patterns. The latter's routing mechanism can effectively propagate inter-frame difference in spatiotemporal scenarios and adaptively ignore static representations. They provides a solid foundation for realizing a unified architecture for static and dynamic COD. Moreover, considering the uncertainty and ambiguity derived from indistinguishable textures, we construct a simple yet effective regularization, uncertainty awareness loss, to encourage predictions with higher confidence in candidate regions. Our highly task-friendly framework consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in image and video COD benchmarks. The code will be available at \url{https://github.com/lartpang/ZoomNeXt}.