EviRCOD: Evidence-Guided Probabilistic Decoding for Referring Camouflaged Object Detection
Authors: Ye Wang, Kai Huang, Sumin Shen, Chenyang Ma
Organizations: West China Hospital, Sichuan University · Independent Researcher · Department of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, Auckland University of Technology
Referring Camouflaged Object Detection (Ref-COD) focuses on segmenting specific camouflaged targets in a query image using category-aligned references. Despite recent advances, existing methods struggle with reference-target semantic alignment, explicit uncertainty modeling, and robust boundary preservation. To address these issues, we propose EviRCOD, an integrated framework consisting of three core components: (1) a Reference-Guided Deformable Encoder (RGDE) that employs hierarchical reference-driven modulation and multi-scale deformable aggregation to inject semantic priors and align cross-scale representations; (2) an Uncertainty-Aware Evidential Decoder (UAED) that incorporates Dirichlet evidence estimation into hierarchical decoding to model uncertainty and propagate confidence across scales; and (3) a Boundary-Aware Refinement Module (BARM) that selectively enhances ambiguous boundaries by exploiting low-level edge cues and prediction confidence. Experiments on the Ref-COD benchmark demonstrate that EviRCOD achieves state-of-the-art detection performance while providing well-calibrated uncertainty estimates. Code is available at: https://github.com/blueecoffee/EviRCOD.
Figures & tables
Fig. 1: Visual comparisons of different methods. The proposed EviRCOD generates more complete segmentation structures, sharper boundaries, and fewer background misclassifications compared to R2CNet [ 2 ] and UAT [ 3 ] .
Fig. 2: Architecture of EviRCOD, illustrating the Reference-Guided Deformable Encoder, the Uncertainty-Aware Evidential Decoder, and the Boundary-Aware Refinement Module for uncertainty-aware Referring Camouflaged Object Detection.
Fig. 3: Qualitative comparisons between EviRCOD and the main Ref-COD baselines (R2CNet [ 2 ] and UAT [ 3 ] ). EviRCOD produces more coherent object masks with sharper boundaries and significantly fewer background errors, highlighting its superiority in challenging camouflage scenarios.
Models
Pub&Year
Overall
Single Object
Multiple Objects
Sm↑
αE↑
ωF↑
M↓
Sm↑
αE↑
ωF↑
M↓
Sm↑
αE↑
ωF↑
M↓
PFNet-Ref
PFNet [ 8 ] : CVPR-2021
0.811
0.885
0.687
0.036
0.815
0.886
0.691
0.035
0.764
0.873
0.632
0.045
PreyNet-Ref
PreyNet [ 9 ] : ACMMM-2022
0.817
0.900
0.704
0.032
0.822
0.900
0.709
0.032
0.763
0.898
0.645
0.041
SINetV2-Ref
SINetV2 [ 10 ] : TPAMI-2022
0.823
0.888
0.700
0.033
0.828
0.889
0.705
0.032
0.771
0.874
0.634
0.043
BGNet-Ref
BGNet [ 11 ] : IJCAI-2022
0.840
0.909
0.738
0.029
0.844
0.910
0.742
0.029
0.792
0.887
0.679
0.036
BSANet-Ref
BSANet [ 12 ] : AAAI-2022
0.830
0.912
0.727
0.030
0.827
0.913
0.733
0.030
0.774
0.895
0.655
0.039
TABLE I: QUANTITATIVE COMPARISON OF EviRCOD WITH STATE-OF-THE-ART METHODS. The best three results are highlighted with bold (1st), solid underline (2nd), and dashed underline (3rd). “ ↑ ”: the higher the better, “ ↓ ”: the lower the better.
Configuration
Sm↑
αE↑
ωF↑
M↓
Baseline
0.838
0.908
0.751
0.027
Baseline + RGDE
0.854
0.928
0.775
0.023
Baseline + UAED
0.859
0.932
0.780
0.024
Baseline + BARM
0.848
0.917
0.760
0.025
Baseline + RGDE + UAED
0.865
0.940
0.794
0.022
Baseline + RGDE + BARM
0.860
0.933
0.781
0.022
TABLE II: Ablation on R2C7K: module contributions to structure, alignment, contour, and pixel-wise metrics.
Configuration
Sm↑
αE↑
ωF↑
M↓
EUQM
0.867
0.940
0.793
0.021
EGA
0.864
0.937
0.790
0.021
UMRM
0.865
0.938
0.791
0.021
EUQM+EGA
0.867
0.941
0.796
0.021
EUQM+UMRM
0.868
0.942
0.797
0.021
EGA+UMRM
0.865
0.939
0.792
0.021
TABLE III: Ablation of UAED sub-modules (EUQM, EGA, and UMRM).
Fig. 4: Calibration comparison between UAT and our method.
Reference-guided camouflaged object detection aims to segment a target whose visual appearance closely resembles its surroundings by exploiting auxiliary reference samples. The task remains difficult because reference samples contain inconsistent target cues, while generic visual representations are not inherently aligned with the target specified by the references. To handle these problems, we present a consensus-aware multi-source fusion framework. Reference-Conditioned Dual-Backbone Fusion (RCDF) couples trainable PVTv2 query features with frozen DINOv3 representations and uses reference-conditioned correlation to select foundation-model evidence before multi-scale fusion. The framework also aggregates multiple references through cross-reference consensus aggregation and injects reference information at semantic depths matched to the query features. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The results further show that reference consensus, target-conditioned foundation features, and hierarchical decoding provide complementary improvements under the evaluation protocol. The source code will be made publicly available upon acceptance.
Junyang Xia, Luocheng Zhang, Wenwen Pan +4
School of Computer Science, Hangzhou Dianzi University, Hangzhou 310018, China
Unsupervised Camouflaged Object Detection (UCOD) remains a challenging task due to the high intrinsic similarity between target objects and their surroundings, as well as the reliance on noisy pseudo-labels that hinder fine-grained texture learning. While existing refinement strategies aim to alleviate label noise, they often overlook intrinsic perceptual cues, leading to boundary overflow and structural ambiguity. In contrast, learning without pseudo-label guidance yields coarse features with significant detail loss. To address these issues, we propose a unified UCOD framework that enhances both the reliability of pseudo-labels and the fidelity of features. Our approach introduces the Multi-Cue Native Perception module, which extracts intrinsic visual priors by integrating low-level texture cues with mid-level semantics, enabling precise alignment between masks and native object information. Additionally, Pseudo-Label Evolution Fusion intelligently refines labels through teacher-student interaction and utilizes depthwise separable convolution for efficient semantic denoising. It also incorporates Spectral Tensor Attention Fusion to effectively balance semantic and structural information through compact spectral aggregation across multi-layer attention maps. Finally, Local Pseudo-Label Refinement plays a pivotal role in local detail optimization by leveraging attention diversity to restore fine textures and enhance boundary fidelity. Extensive experiments on multiple UCOD datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, characterized by superior detail perception, robust boundary alignment, and strong generalization under complex camouflage scenarios. Code is available at https://github.com/JSLiam94/EReCu.
Shuo Jiang, Gaojia Zhang, Min Tan +2
Zhejiang Key Laboratory of Space Information Sensing and Transmission, Hangzhou Dianzi University · Laboratory of Complex Systems Modeling and Simulation, School of Computer Science and Technology, Hangzhou Dianzi University · College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University
Camouflaged Object Detection (COD) aims to segment objects that are highly integrated with the background in terms of color, texture, and structure, making it a highly challenging task in computer vision. Although existing methods introduce multi-scale fusion and attention mechanisms to alleviate the above issues, they generally lack the guidance of textual semantic priors, which limits the model's ability to focus on camouflaged regions in complex scenes. To address this issue, this paper proposes a Language-Guided Structure-Aware Network (LGSAN). Specifically, based on the visual backbone PVT-v2, we introduce CLIP to generate masks from text prompts and RGB images, thereby guiding the multi-scale features extracted by PVT-v2 to focus on potential target regions. On this foundation, we further design a Fourier Edge Enhancement Module (FEEM), which integrates multi-scale features with high-frequency information in the frequency domain to extract edge enhancement features. Furthermore, we propose a Structure-Aware Attention Module (SAAM) to effectively enhance the model's perception of object structures and boundaries. Finally, we introduce a Coarse-Guided Local Refinement Module (CGLRM) to enhance fine-grained reconstruction and boundary integrity of camouflaged object regions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method consistently achieves highly competitive performance across multiple COD datasets, validating its effectiveness and robustness.
Min Zhang
School of Artificial Intelligence, Chongqing University of Technology, Chongqing, 401120, China