Continuous Feature Representation for Camouflaged Object Detection

Camouflaged object detection (COD) aims to discover objects that are seamlessly embedded in the environment. Existing COD methods have made significant progress by typically representing features in a discrete way with arrays of pixels. However, limited by discrete representation, these methods need to align features of different scales during decoding, which causes some subtle discriminative clues to become blurred. This is a huge blow to the task of identifying camouflaged objects from clear subtle clues. To address this issue, we propose a novel continuous feature representation network (CFRN), which aims to represent features of different scales as a continuous function for COD. Specifically, a Swin transformer encoder is first exploited to explore the global context between camouflaged objects and the background. Then, an object-focusing module (OFM) deployed layer by layer is designed to deeply mine subtle discriminative clues, thereby highlighting the body of camouflaged objects and suppressing other distracting objects at different scales. Finally, a novel frequency-based implicit feature decoder (FIFD) is proposed, which directly decodes the predictions at arbitrary coordinates in the continuous function with implicit neural representations, thus propagating clearer discriminative clues. Extensive experiments on four challenging COD benchmarks demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods. The source code will be available at https://github.com/SongZeHNU/CFRN