Camouflaged Object Segmentation Based on Matching–Recognition–Refinement Network

In the biosphere, camouflaged objects take the advantage of visional wholeness by keeping the color and texture of the objects highly consistent with the background, thereby confusing the visual mechanism of other creatures and achieving a concealed effect. This is also the main reason why the task of camouflaged object detection is challenging. In this article, we break the visual wholeness and see through the camouflage from the perspective of matching the appropriate field of view. We propose a matching–recognition–refinement network (MRR-Net), which consists of two key modules, i.e., the visual field matching and recognition module (VFMRM) and the stepwise refinement module (SWRM). In the VFMRM, various feature receptive fields are used to match candidate areas of camouflaged objects of different sizes and shapes and adaptively activate and recognize the approximate area of the real camouflaged object. The SWRM then uses the features extracted by the backbone to gradually refine the camouflaged region obtained by VFMRM, thus yielding the complete camouflaged object. In addition, a more efficient deep supervision method is exploited, making the features from the backbone input into the SWRM more critical and not redundant. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our MRR-Net runs in real-time (82.6 frames/s) and significantly outperforms 30 state-of-the-art models on three challenging datasets under three standard metrics. Furthermore, MRR-Net is applied to four downstream tasks of camouflaged object segmentation (COS), and the results validate its practical application value. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/XinyuYanTJU/MRR-Net.