Stepwise Decomposition and Dual-stream Focus: A Novel Approach for Training-free Camouflaged Object Segmentation

While promptable segmentation (e.g., SAM) has shown promise for various segmentation tasks, it still requires manual visual prompts for each object to be segmented. In contrast, task-generic promptable segmentation aims to reduce the need for such detailed prompts by employing only a task-generic prompt to guide segmentation across all test samples. However, when applied to Camouflaged Object Segmentation (COS), current methods still face two critical issues: 1) semantic ambiguity in getting instance-specific text prompts, which arises from insufficient discriminative cues in holistic captions, leading to foreground-background confusion; 2) semantic discrepancy combined with spatial separation in getting instance-specific visual prompts, which results from global background sampling far from object boundaries with low feature correlation, causing SAM to segment irrelevant regions. To mitigate the issues above, we propose RDVP-MSD, a novel training-free test-time adaptation framework that synergizes Region-constrained Dual-stream Visual Prompting (RDVP) via Multimodal Stepwise Decomposition Chain of Thought (MSD-CoT). MSD-CoT progressively disentangles image captions to eliminate semantic ambiguity, while RDVP injects spatial constraints into visual prompting and independently samples visual prompts for foreground and background points, effectively mitigating semantic discrepancy and spatial separation. Without requiring any training or supervision, RDVP-MSD achieves a state-of-the-art segmentation result on multiple COS benchmarks. The codes will be available at https://github.com/ycyinchao/RDVP-MSD.