Conditional Diffusion Models for Camouflaged and Salient Object Detection

Camouflaged Object Detection (COD) poses a significant challenge in computer vision, playing a critical role in applications. Existing COD methods often exhibit challenges in accurately predicting nuanced boundaries with high-confidence predictions. In this work, we introduce CamoDiffusion, a new learning method that employs a conditional diffusion model to generate masks that progressively refine the boundaries of camouflaged objects. In particular, we first design an adaptive transformer conditional network, specifically designed for integration into a Denoising Network, which facilitates iterative refinement of the saliency masks. Second, based on the classical diffusion model training, we investigate a variance noise schedule and a structure corruption strategy, which aim to enhance the accuracy of our denoising model by effectively handling uncertain input. Third, we introduce a Consensus Time Ensemble technique, which integrates intermediate predictions using a sampling mechanism, thus reducing overconfidence and incorrect predictions. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets that show that: 1) the efficacy and universality of our method is demonstrated in both camouflaged and salient object detection tasks. 2) compared to existing state-of-the-art methods, CamoDiffusion demonstrates superior performance 3) CamoDiffusion offers flexible enhancements, such as an accelerated version based on the VQ-VAE model and a skip approach.