Camouflaged Object Detection with Enhanced Small-Structure Awareness in Complex Backgrounds

Small-Structure Camouflaged Object Detection (SSCOD) is a highly promising yet challenging task, as small-structure targets often exhibit weaker features and occupy a significantly smaller proportion of the image compared to normal-sized targets. Such data are not only prevalent in existing benchmark camouflaged object detection datasets but also frequently encountered in real-world scenarios. Although existing camouflaged object detection (COD) methods have significantly improved detection accuracy, research specifically focused on SSCOD remains limited. To further advance the SSCOD task, we propose a detail-preserving multi-scale adaptive network architecture that incorporates the following key components: (1) An adaptive scaling strategy designed to mimic human visual perception when observing blurry targets. (2) An Attentive Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling (A2SPP) module, enabling each position in the feature map to autonomously learn the optimal feature scale. (3) A scale integration mechanism, leveraging Haar Wavelet-based Downsampling (HWD) and bilinear upsampling to preserve both contextual and fine-grained details across multiple scales. (4) A Feature Enhancement Module (FEM), specifically tailored to refine feature representations in small-structure detection scenarios. Extensive comparative experiments and ablation studies conducted on three camouflaged object detection datasets, as well as our proposed small-structure test datasets, demonstrated that our framework outperformed existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. Notably, our approach achieved superior performance in detecting small-structured targets, highlighting its effectiveness and robustness in addressing the challenges of SSCOD tasks. Additionally, we conducted polyp segmentation experiments on four datasets, and the results showed that our framework is also well-suited for polyp segmentation, consistently outperforming other recent methods.