Focus on the Object: Gradient-based Feature Modulation for Camouflaged Object Segmentation

Camouflaged Object Segmentation (COS) seeks to accurately identify and segment objects that are intricately blended with their surroundings, making them challenging to distinguish at the pixel level. Existing COS methods often struggle to capture the subtle distinctions between targets and backgrounds, despite their improved adaptability to camouflaged objects. To address this challenge, we propose a novel Adaptive Camouflage Discrimination Network (ACDNet), to focus more attention on object-relevant features while suppressing attached camouflage features. The proposed ACDNet enjoys several merits. First, we design a gradient-based feature modulator that injects gradient information into channel-wise attention layers, thereby enhancing the discriminability between camouflaged objects and background features. Second, a hierarchical prompting strategy is introduced to endow the prototype-based classifier with target awareness and multi-level perception, mitigating the impact of camouflage diversity. Extensive experimental results on four benchmarks demonstrate that our ACDNet performs favorably against state-of-the-art COS methods.