Camouflaged objects are generally difficult to be detected in their natural environment even for human beings. In this paper, we propose a novel bio-inspired network, named the MirrorNet, that leverages both instance segmentation and bio-inspired attack stream for the camouflaged object segmentation. Differently from existing networks for segmentation, our proposed network possesses two segmentation streams: the main stream and the bio-inspired attack stream corresponding with the original image and its flipped image, respectively. The output from the bio-inspired attack stream is then fused into the main stream’s result for the final camouflage map to boost up the segmentation accuracy. Extensive experiments conducted on the public CAMO dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed network. Our proposed method achieves 89% in accuracy, outperforming the state-of-the-arts.

This paper pushes the envelope on decomposing camouflaged regions in an image into meaningful components, namely, camouflaged instances. To promote the new task of camouflaged instance segmentation of in-the-wild images, we introduce a dataset, dubbed CAMO++, that extends our preliminary CAMO dataset (camouflaged object segmentation) in terms of quantity and diversity. The new dataset substantially increases the number of images with hierarchical pixel-wise ground truths. We also provide a benchmark suite for the task of camouflaged instance segmentation. In particular, we present an extensive evaluation of state-of-the-art instance segmentation methods on our newly constructed CAMO++ dataset in various scenarios. We also present a camouflage fusion learning (CFL) framework for camouflaged instance segmentation to further improve the performance of state-of-the-art methods. The dataset, model, evaluation suite, and benchmark will be made publicly available on our project page.

Unmanned aircraft systems or drones enable us to record or capture many scenes from the bird’s-eye view and they have been fast deployed to a wide range of practical domains, i.e., agriculture, aerial photography, fast delivery and surveillance. Object detection task is one of the core steps in understanding videos collected from the drones. However, this task is very challenging due to the unconstrained viewpoints and low resolution of captured videos. While deep-learning modern object detectors have recently achieved great success in general benchmarks, i.e., PASCAL-VOC and MS-COCO, the robustness of these detectors on aerial images captured by drones is not well studied. In this paper, we present an evaluation of state-of-the-art deep-learning detectors including Faster R-CNN (Faster Regional CNN), RFCN (Region-based Fully Convolutional Networks), SNIPER (Scale Normalization for Image Pyramids with Efficient Resampling), Single-Shot Detector (SSD), YOLO (You Only Look Once), RetinaNet, and CenterNet for the object detection in videos captured by drones. We conduct experiments on VisDrone2019 dataset which contains 96 videos with 39,988 annotated frames and provide insights into efficient object detectors for aerial images.

Salient object detection aims to detect the main objects in the given image. In this paper, we proposed an approach that integrates semantic priors into the salient object detection process. The method first obtains an explicit saliency map that is refined by the explicit semantic priors learned from data. Then an implicit saliency map is constructed using a trained model that maps the implicit semantic priors embedded into superpixel features with the saliency values. Next, the fusion saliency map is computed by adaptively fusing both the explicit and implicit semantic maps. The final saliency map is eventually computed via the post-processing refinement step. Experimental results have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method, particularly, it achieves competitive performance with the state-of-the-art baselines on three challenging datasets, namely, ECSSD, HKUIS, and iCoSeg.