Camouflaged object detection (COD) is an important engineering task in intelligent optical perception, but it remains challenging when targets closely resemble their surroundings. Polarization imaging provides complementary physical cues, whereas existing methods typically assume fixed multimodal input configurations and entangle intra-polarization coordination with interaction between red-green-blue (RGB) and polarization representations. We propose LGFN, a lightweight gated RGB-polarization fusion framework supporting separately optimized RGB-only and polarization-assisted configurations. A deterministic Modality Router selects the appropriate configuration according to polarization availability. In the multimodal configuration, an availability-conditioned Modality Gate calibrates the available polarization branches; the Gated Polarization Hub coordinates learned degree of linear polarization (DoLP) and angle of polarization (AoP) representations with explicit polarization cues; and RGB-Polarization Cross Fusion introduces the coordinated representation into the RGB hierarchy through controlled residual interaction. The multimodal configuration requires neither sample-dependent statistics nor handcrafted quality descriptors during inference. On the complete 230-image PCOD_1200 test set, the RGB-only configuration achieves a mean absolute error of 0.0090, a Dice score of 0.8806, and an intersection over union of 0.8144, obtaining the best results on all six metrics among the evaluated RGB-based methods. Under a common local reevaluation protocol, the multimodal configuration outperforms PolarNet and IPNet on all six metrics. Relative to IPNet, it reduces the parameter count, floating-point operations, and latency by 53.1%, 73.6%, and 63.0%, respectively.
Polarization image fusion combines the stable luminance and structural information of the total- intensity image S0 with the material-sensitive details of the degree of linear polarization (DoLP) image. However, the reliability of DoLP varies spatially, and indiscriminate polarization transfer may amplify unstable responses or disturb the structural appearance anchored by S0. We therefore propose LG-PF, a lightweight confidence-guided framework that formulates polarization fusion as a selective residual transfer process. A Polarization Confidence Prior estimates spatially reliable polarization responses, a Mask-guided Multi-scale Fusion module regulates their transfer across three feature scales, and a Lightweight Context-aware Bounded Correction Head stabilizes local photometric and structural transitions. Confidence guidance is also incorporated into the optimization objectives to preserve reliable polarization details while suppressing unsupported responses. We also construct MSP, a multi-scene polarization fusion dataset containing 1000 pixel-aligned image pairs from 17 indoor and outdoor scene categories. LG-PF achieves the best results across all six evaluated metrics on MSP, while subset-based evaluations on PIF and GAND show promising transferability without fine-tuning. With only 0.2936 M parameters and an inference time of 21.712 ms per image, LG-PF achieves competitive fusion quality with low computational cost. The source code, dataset, and official data splits will be made publicly available upon publication.
Camouflaged Object Detection (COD) aims to identify and segment camouflaged objects in complex environments, which are often concealed because their color and texture are similar to the background. Several existing COD methods introduce depth maps to boost detection performance via learning complementary RGB-D features, ignoring modality-specific characteristics of concealed objects in the depth domain. To address this issue, we propose a depth collaborative network, called VCP-DCN, to mine distinguishable multi-modality features beyond visual concealed prototype in depth domain. Specifically, VCP-DCN progressively performs multi-modality alignment, interaction, and fusion for the COD task. In the \textbf{alignment} stage, we propose a Separable Prototype Embedding (SPE) module to learn modality-consistency and modality-specific RGB/depth prototype tokens through prototype contrastive learning. Furthermore, we develop a Multi-modality Dual Attention (MDA) module to enhance the cross-modal feature representation through local response maps between modality-consistency RGB/depth prototype tokens and visual tokens on the \textbf{interaction} stage. Finally, we design a Depth Adaptive Injection (DAI) module to adaptively measure contribution of RGB/depth features with a decision-making mechanism, which calculates similarity distance between RGB/depth modality-specific prototype tokens and modality-consistency ones on the \textbf{fusion} stage. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our VCP-DCN on three authoritative datasets.
Recent advances in camouflaged object detection (COD) have led to substantial progress in challenging low-visibility scenarios, with pioneering studies demonstrating notable success in localizing objects in camouflaged scenes. Despite these achievements, existing approaches predominantly rely on conventional three-channel RGB imagery, thereby constraining the available visual information to a limited spectral range. Multispectral images offer a wide range of information about a scene by capturing fine-grained spectral signatures. Hence, by leveraging multispectral images for COD, we introduce a novel approach to detect camouflaged objects from the corresponding multispectral inputs. In particular, we propose an end-to-end framework, \textbf{\textit{MSFormer}}, that takes a multispectral camouflaged image as input and predicts a binary mask for it. Additionally, we also provide empirical justification for integrating multispectral bands for this complex low-vision task. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, which outperforms existing methods.