Camouflaged Object Detection Based on Ternary Cascade Perception

Abstract

Camouflaged object detection (COD), in a broad sense, aims to detect image objects that have high degrees of similarity to the background. COD is more challenging than conventional object detection because of the high degree of “fusion” between a camouflaged object and the background. In this paper, we focused on the accurate detection of camouflaged objects, conducting an in-depth study on COD and addressing the common detection problems of high miss rates and low confidence levels. We proposed a ternary cascade perception-based method for detecting camouflaged objects and constructed a cascade perception network (CPNet). The innovation lies in the proposed ternary cascade perception module (TCPM), which focuses on extracting the relationship information between features and the spatial information of the camouflaged target and the location information of key points. In addition, a cascade aggregation pyramid (CAP) and a joint loss function have been proposed to recognize camouflaged objects accurately. We conducted comprehensive experiments on the COD10K dataset and compared our proposed approach with other seventeen-object detection models. The experimental results showed that CPNet achieves optimal results in terms of six evaluation metrics, including an average precision (AP)50 that reaches 91.41, an AP75 that improves to 73.04, and significantly higher detection accuracy and confidence.