MCOD: The First Challenging Benchmark for Multispectral Camouflaged Object Detection

Camouflaged Object Detection (COD) aims to identify objects that blend seamlessly into natural scenes. Although RGB-based methods have advanced, their performance remains limited under challenging conditions. Multispectral imagery, providing rich spectral information, offers a promising alternative for enhanced foreground-background discrimination. However, existing COD benchmark datasets are exclusively RGB-based, lacking essential support for multispectral approaches, which has impeded progress in this area. To address this gap, we introduce MCOD, the first challenging benchmark dataset specifically designed for multispectral camouflaged object detection. MCOD features three key advantages: (i) Comprehensive challenge attributes: It captures real-world difficulties such as small object sizes and extreme lighting conditions commonly encountered in COD tasks. (ii) Diverse real-world scenarios: The dataset spans a wide range of natural environments to better reflect practical applications. (iii) High-quality pixel-level annotations: Each image is manually annotated with precise object masks and corresponding challenge attribute labels. We benchmark eleven representative COD methods on MCOD, observing a consistent performance drop due to increased task difficulty. Notably, integrating multispectral modalities substantially alleviates this degradation, highlighting the value of spectral information in enhancing detection robustness. We anticipate MCOD will provide a strong foundation for future research in multispectral camouflaged object detection. The dataset is publicly accessible at https://github.com/yl2900260-bit/MCOD.