A Cross-Level Iterative Subtraction Network for Camouflaged Object Detection

Camouflaged object detection (COD) is a challenging task, aimed at segmenting objects that are similar in color and texture to their background. Sufficient multi-scale feature fusion is crucial for accurately segmenting object regions. However, most methods usually focus on information compensation, overlooking the difference between features, which is important for distinguishing the object from the background. To this end, we propose the cross-level iterative subtraction network (CISNet), which integrates information from cross-layer features and enhances details through iteration mechanisms. CISNet involves a cross-level iterative structure (CIS) for feature complementarity, where texture information is used to enrich high-level features and semantic information is used to enhance low-level features. In particular, we present a multi-scale strip convolution subtraction (MSCSub) module within CIS to extract difference information between cross-level features and fuse multi-scale features, which improves the feature representation and guides accurate segmentation. Furthermore, an enhanced guided attention (EGA) module is presented to refine features by deeply mining local context information and capturing a broader range of relationships between different feature maps in a top-down manner. Extensive experiments conducted on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art COD models in all evaluation metrics.