# ZoomNeXt: A Unified Collaborative Pyramid Network for Camouflaged Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.20208 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.20208/

## Key facts

- Cited by 48 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 46 of its 91 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Oct 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [Outrageously Large Neural Networks: The Sparsely-Gated Mixture-of-Experts Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.06538/) (2017)
- [TSM: Temporal Shift Module for Efficient Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.08383/) (2018)
- [PVT v2: Improved Baselines with Pyramid Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13797/) (2021)
- [Scaling Vision with Sparse Mixture of Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05974/) (2021)
- [Spatial Pyramid Pooling in Deep Convolutional Networks for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.4729/) (2014)
- [Structure-measure: A New Way to Evaluate Foreground Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.00786/) (2017)
- [Res2Net: A New Multi-scale Backbone Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01169/) (2019)
- [PraNet: Parallel Reverse Attention Network for Polyp Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11392/) (2020)
- [Enhanced-alignment Measure for Binary Foreground Map Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.10421/) (2018)
- [EGNet:Edge Guidance Network for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08297/) (2019)
- [Cascaded Partial Decoder for Fast and Accurate Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08739/) (2019)
- [A Simple Pooling-Based Design for Real-Time Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09569/) (2019)
- [Multi-scale Interactive Network for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09062/) (2020)
- [Concealed Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.10274/) (2021)
- [Inf-Net: Automatic COVID-19 Lung Infection Segmentation from CT Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14133/) (2020)
- [Salient Object Detection in the Deep Learning Era: An In-Depth Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09146/) (2019)
- [Camouflaged Object Segmentation with Distraction Mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10475/) (2021)
- [Zoom In and Out: A Mixed-scale Triplet Network for Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02688/) (2022)
- [DSelect-k: Differentiable Selection in the Mixture of Experts with Applications to Multi-Task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03760/) (2021)
- [Uncertainty-aware Joint Salient Object and Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02628/) (2021)
- [Salient Object Detection: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.5878/) (2014)
- [Scaling Vision-Language Models with Sparse Mixture of Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07226/) (2023)
- [Feature Shrinkage Pyramid for Camouflaged Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14816/) (2023)
- [Video Polyp Segmentation: A Deep Learning Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14291/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 48)

- [VisionLLM v2: An End-to-End Generalist Multimodal Large Language Model for Hundreds of Vision-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08394/) (2024)
- [Seg-R1: Segmentation Can Be Surprisingly Simple with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.22624/) (2025)
- [A Survey of Camouflaged Object Detection and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.14562/) (2024)
- [Hierarchical Graph Interaction Transformer with Dynamic Token Clustering for Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15020/) (2024)
- [Open-Vocabulary Camouflaged Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11241/) (2023)
- [Integrating Extra Modality Helps Segmentor Find Camouflaged Objects Well](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14471/) (2025)
- [Improving SAM for Camouflaged Object Detection via Dual Stream Adapters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06042/) (2025)
- [When SAM2 Meets Video Camouflaged Object Segmentation: A Comprehensive Evaluation and Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18653/) (2024)
- [Reversible Unfolding Network for Concealed Visual Perception with Generative Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.15027/) (2025)
- [UCOD-DPL: Unsupervised Camouflaged Object Detection via Dynamic Pseudo-label Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07087/) (2025)
- [Inspiring the Next Generation of Segment Anything Models: Comprehensively Evaluate SAM and SAM 2 with Diverse Prompts Towards Context-Dependent Concepts under Different Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01240/) (2024)
- [Controllable-LPMoE: Adapting to Challenging Object Segmentation via Dynamic Local Priors from Mixture-of-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.21114/) (2025)
- [High-Precision Dichotomous Image Segmentation via Probing Diffusion Capacity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10105/) (2024)
- [CamSAM2: Segment Anything Accurately in Camouflaged Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19730/) (2025)
- [COMPrompter: reconceptualized segment anything model with multiprompt network for camouflaged object detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18858/) (2024)
- [Deep Learning in Concealed Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10979/) (2025)
- [Refining Context-Entangled Content Segmentation via Curriculum Selection and Anti-Curriculum Promotion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.01183/) (2026)
- [Adaptive Guidance Learning for Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.02824/) (2024)
- [Segment Concealed Objects with Incomplete Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08955/) (2025)
- [Rethinking Evaluation of Infrared Small Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.16888/) (2025)
- [Towards Real Zero-Shot Camouflaged Object Segmentation without Camouflaged Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16953/) (2024)
- [SCOUT: Semi-supervised Camouflaged Object Detection by Utilizing Text and Adaptive Data Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.17843/) (2025)
- [UniMRSeg: Unified Modality-Relax Segmentation via Hierarchical Self-Supervised Compensation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.16170/) (2025)
- [Discover, Segment, and Select: A Progressive Mechanism for Zero-shot Camouflaged Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.19944/) (2026)
- [ZS-VCOS: Zero-Shot Video Camouflaged Object Segmentation By Optical Flow and Open Vocabulary Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.01431/) (2025)
- [YUV20K: A Complexity-Driven Benchmark and Trajectory-Aware Alignment Model for Video Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.09985/) (2026)
- [Segment Anything with Motion, Geometry, and Semantic Adaptation for Complex Nonlinear Visual Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.22538/) (2026)
- [Fine-grained spatial-temporal perception for gas leak segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.00295/) (2025)
- [EReCu: Pseudo-label Evolution Fusion and Refinement with Multi-Cue Learning for Unsupervised Camouflage Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.11521/) (2026)
- [CAMotion: A High-Quality Benchmark for Camouflaged Moving Object Detection in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.08287/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent camouflaged object detection (COD) attempts to segment objects visually blended into their surroundings, which is extremely complex and difficult in real-world scenarios. Apart from the high intrinsic similarity between camouflaged objects and their background, objects are usually diverse in scale, fuzzy in appearance, and even severely occluded. To this end, we propose an effective unified collaborative pyramid network that mimics human behavior when observing vague images and videos, ie zooming in and out. Specifically, our approach employs the zooming strategy to learn discriminative mixed-scale semantics by the multi-head scale integration and rich granularity perception units, which are designed to fully explore imperceptible clues between candidate objects and background surroundings. The former's intrinsic multi-head aggregation provides more diverse visual patterns. The latter's routing mechanism can effectively propagate inter-frame differences in spatiotemporal scenarios and be adaptively deactivated and output all-zero results for static representations. They provide a solid foundation for realizing a unified architecture for static and dynamic COD. Moreover, considering the uncertainty and ambiguity derived from indistinguishable textures, we construct a simple yet effective regularization, uncertainty awareness loss, to encourage predictions with higher confidence in candidate regions. Our highly task-friendly framework consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in image and video COD benchmarks. Our code can be found at https://github.com/lartpang/ZoomNeXt.