Hunt Camouflaged Objects via Revealing Mutation Regions

Due to the high similarity between hidden objects and the surrounding background, camouflaged object detection (COD) remains a challenge. While many recently proposed methods have shown remarkable performance, most of them begin object perception by indiscriminately considering every pixel of the image. However, these early-stage region-insensitive perception methods still struggle to resist background interference, potentially missing subtle pixel changes by not prioritizing potential camouflaged areas initially. Fortunately, we reveal that the availability of an accurate mutation map can significantly enhance camouflaged discrimination ability. To this end, we propose MRNet (Mutation Region Network). MRNet initially generates a mutation map that identifies potential mutation regions exhibiting subtle pixel changes. The generation method involves amplifying and differing pixel changes based on the position and corresponding values of pixels. Subsequently, the selective expansion search operation utilizes the mutation map to extract the mapped graph, effectively reducing interference from background pixels that are distant from the mutation regions. Finally, decoding the mapped graph generates precise masks. Furthermore, we have created the largest test dataset with known categories to advance community research. Extensive experiments conducted on three widely used datasets and our proposed dataset show that MRNet surpasses other methods with superior performance. Source code is publicly available at https://github.com/XinyueZhangHust/MRNet