SPANet: Spatial perceptual activation network for camouflaged object detection

Abstract Camouflaged object detection (COD) aims to segment objects embedded in the environment from the background. Most existing methods are easily affected by background interference in cluttered environments and cannot accurately locate camouflage areas, resulting in over‐segmentation or incomplete segmentation structures. To effectively improve the performance of COD, we propose a spatial perceptual activation network (SPANet). SPANet extracts the spatial positional relationship between each object in the scene by activating spatial perception and uses it as global information to guide segmentation. It mainly consists of three modules: perceptual activation module (PAM), feature inference module (FIM), and interaction recovery module (IRM). Specifically, the authors design a PAM to model the positional relationship between the camouflaged object and the surrounding environment to obtain semantic correlation information. Then, a FIM that can effectively combine correlation information to suppress background interference and re‐encode to generate multi‐scale features is proposed. In addition, to further fuse multi‐scale features, an IRM to mine the complementary information and differences between features at different scales is designed. Extensive experimental results on four widely used benchmark datasets (i.e. CAMO, CHAMELEON, COD10K, and NC4K) show that the authors’ method outperforms 13 state‐of‐the‐art methods.