Mask-and-Edge Co-Guided Separable Network for Camouflaged Object Detection

Camouflaged object detection (COD) involves segmenting objects that share similar patterns, such as color and texture, with their surroundings. Current methods typically employ multiple well-designed modules or rely on edge cues to learn object feature representations for COD. However, these methods still struggle to capture the discriminative semantics between camouflaged objects (foreground) and background, possibly generating blurry prediction maps. To address these limitations, we propose a novel mask-and-edge co-guided separable network (MECS-Net) for COD that leverages both edge and mask cues to learn more discriminative representations and improve detection performance. Specifically, we design a mask-and-edge co-guided separable attention (MECSA) module, which consists of three flows for separately capturing edge, foreground, and background semantics. In addition, we propose a multi-scale enhancement fusion (MEF) module to aggregate multi-scale features of objects. The predictions are decoded in a top-down manner. Extensive experiments and visualizations demonstrate that our CNN-based and Transformer-based MECS-Net outperform 13 state-of-the-art methods on four popular COD datasets. Codes and results are available ^{https://github.com/TomorrowJW/MECS-Net-COD$\ast$} .