Camouflaged object detection (COD) aims to segment those camouflaged objects that blend perfectly into their surroundings. Due to the low boundary contrast between camouflaged objects and their surroundings, their detection poses a significant challenge. Despite the numerous excellent camouflaged object detection methods developed in recent years, issues such as boundary refinement and multi-level feature extraction and fusion still need further exploration. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-level feature integration network (MFNet) for camouflaged object detection. Firstly, we design an edge guidance module (EGM) to improve the COD performance by providing additional boundary semantic information by combining high-level semantic information and low-level spatial details to model the edges of camouflaged objects. Additionally, we propose a multi-level feature integration module (MFIM), which leverages the fine local information of low-level features and the rich global information of high-level features in adjacent three-level features to provide a supplementary feature representation for the current-level features, effectively integrating the full context semantic information. Finally, we propose a context aggregation refinement module (CARM) to efficiently aggregate and refine the cross-level features to obtain clear prediction maps. Our extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets show that the MFNet model is an effective COD model and outperforms other state-of-the-art models in all four evaluation metrics (Sα, Eϕ, Fβw, and MAE).
Keywords: attention mechanism; boundary semantic information; camouflaged object detection; multi-level feature integration.