UEDG:Uncertainty-Edge Dual Guided Camouflage Object Detection

Abstract

According to Darwinian evolutionary theory, numerous species in the wild have developed remarkable adaptive mechanisms, involving pattern rearrangement and environmental assimilation, to evade predators. These obfuscation strategies pose significant challenges for both individuals and algorithms when performing the Camouflage Object Detection (COD) task in complex and intricate scenarios. Inspired by human strategies in the COD task, which involve assigning uncertainties to the entire input and then focusing on highly uncertain areas with the aid of prior knowledge such as boundary information, we propose the Uncertainty-Edge Dual Guide (UEDG) architecture. UEDG effectively combines probabilistic-derived uncertainty and deterministic-derived edge information to accurately detect concealed objects. The architecture consists of two independent branches dedicated to uncertainty reasoning and edge inference, which are subsequently integrated into a feature fusion module utilizing recursion feedback and feature-reuse techniques. This novel COD framework leverages the benefits of Bayesian learning and convolution-based learning, resulting in a powerful multi-task guided approach. Extensive experiments conducted on four widely employed datasets demonstrate the superior performance of UEDG compared to 12 state-of-the-art approaches, while maintaining an acceptable level of computational complexity. Overall, UEDG presents a promising solution for addressing the challenges of COD in complex environments by combining evolutionary-inspired strategies with advanced computer vision techniques.