Boosting Lightweight Camouflaged Object Detection with Multi-Scale Context and Boundary Awareness

Abstract

To adapt to the resource-limited environment, this study introduces the lightweight boundary-aware camouflaged object detection(COD) network LMABnet. We enhance the feature representation capability of the lightweight network through a multi-scale feature fusion architecture, while effectively avoids the model inflation and parameter redundancy of traditional COD methods. The LMABnet adopts the streamlined two-branch architecture that incorporates with the lightweight feature extraction module, which provides the multi-scale feature perception capability and reduces the loss of spatial information caused by rapid downsampling. In addition, based on the principle of "easy before difficult", the lightweight multi-scale feature fusion module discovers the key parts of the camouflaged object through the details. Then enhances the recognition of the object edges by using the edge-attention fusion module, so as to improve the accuracy performance of detection. Empirical evaluations conducted on the COD dataset demonstrate that the proposed methodology not only attains state-of-the-art performance but also accomplishes a significant reduction of 40% in parameter count relative to existing approaches.