# A Unified Query-based Paradigm for Camouflaged Instance Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.07392 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07392/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Aug 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [Masked-attention Mask Transformer for Universal Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01527/) (2021)
- [Cascade R-CNN: Delving into High Quality Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00726/) (2017)
- [Per-Pixel Classification is Not All You Need for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06278/) (2021)
- [DN-DETR: Accelerate DETR Training by Introducing Query DeNoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01305/) (2022)
- [Hybrid Task Cascade for Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07518/) (2019)
- [PraNet: Parallel Reverse Attention Network for Polyp Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11392/) (2020)
- [YOLACT: Real-time Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02689/) (2019)
- [PointRend: Image Segmentation as Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08193/) (2019)
- [Conditional Convolutions for Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.05664/) (2020)
- [SOLO: Segmenting Objects by Locations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04488/) (2019)
- [Mask Scoring R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.00241/) (2019)
- [Concealed Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.10274/) (2021)
- [Simultaneously Localize, Segment and Rank the Camouflaged Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04011/) (2021)
- [Instances as Queries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01928/) (2021)
- [BlendMask: Top-Down Meets Bottom-Up for Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.00309/) (2020)
- [Zoom In and Out: A Mixed-scale Triplet Network for Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02688/) (2022)
- [Mutual Graph Learning for Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02613/) (2021)
- [SeqFormer: Sequential Transformer for Video Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08275/) (2021)
- [Feature Shrinkage Pyramid for Camouflaged Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14816/) (2023)
- [SSAP: Single-Shot Instance Segmentation With Affinity Pyramid](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01616/) (2019)
- [YOLACT++: Better Real-time Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06218/) (2019)
- [Boundary-Guided Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.00794/) (2022)
- [Mask Transfiner for High-Quality Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13673/) (2021)
- [Sparse Instance Activation for Real-Time Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12827/) (2022)
- [SOTR: Segmenting Objects with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06747/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Collaborative Camouflaged Object Detection: A Large-Scale Dataset and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.04253/) (2023)
- [COMPrompter: reconceptualized segment anything model with multiprompt network for camouflaged object detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18858/) (2024)
- [Evaluation Study on SAM 2 for Class-agnostic Instance-level Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.02567/) (2024)
- [PlantCamo: Plant Camouflage Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17598/) (2024)
- [Adaptive Guidance Learning for Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.02824/) (2024)
- [Catch Me If You Can Describe Me: Open-Vocabulary Camouflaged Instance Segmentation with Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17505/) (2023)
- [Expose Camouflage in the Water: Underwater Camouflaged Instance Segmentation and Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.17585/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Due to the high similarity between camouflaged instances and the background, the recently proposed camouflaged instance segmentation (CIS) faces challenges in accurate localization and instance segmentation. To this end, inspired by query-based transformers, we propose a unified query-based multi-task learning framework for camouflaged instance segmentation, termed UQFormer, which builds a set of mask queries and a set of boundary queries to learn a shared composed query representation and efficiently integrates global camouflaged object region and boundary cues, for simultaneous instance segmentation and instance boundary detection in camouflaged scenarios. Specifically, we design a composed query learning paradigm that learns a shared representation to capture object region and boundary features by the cross-attention interaction of mask queries and boundary queries in the designed multi-scale unified learning transformer decoder. Then, we present a transformer-based multi-task learning framework for simultaneous camouflaged instance segmentation and camouflaged instance boundary detection based on the learned composed query representation, which also forces the model to learn a strong instance-level query representation. Notably, our model views the instance segmentation as a query-based direct set prediction problem, without other post-processing such as non-maximal suppression. Compared with 14 state-of-the-art approaches, our UQFormer significantly improves the performance of camouflaged instance segmentation. Our code will be available at https://github.com/dongbo811/UQFormer.