# A Simple yet Effective Network based on Vision Transformer for Camouflaged Object and Salient Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.18922 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18922/

## Key facts

- Cited by 23 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 49 of its 69 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Feb 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 49)

- [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)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [Restormer: Efficient Transformer for High-Resolution Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09881/) (2021)
- [An Overview of Multi-Task Learning in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05098/) (2017)
- [Masked Feature Prediction for Self-Supervised Visual Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09133/) (2021)
- [Vision Transformer Adapter for Dense Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.08534/) (2022)
- [Hybrid Task Cascade for Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07518/) (2019)
- [Masked Autoencoders As Spatiotemporal Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09113/) (2022)
- [Reinforcement Learning with Unsupervised Auxiliary Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05397/) (2016)
- [Learning Pixel-level Semantic Affinity with Image-level Supervision for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10464/) (2018)
- [Anabranch Network for Camouflaged Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.09451/) (2021)
- [Cascaded Partial Decoder for Fast and Accurate Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08739/) (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)
- [The Secrets of Salient Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2807/) (2014)
- [Simultaneously Localize, Segment and Rank the Camouflaged Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04011/) (2021)
- [Visual Saliency Based on Multiscale Deep Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.08663/) (2015)
- [Visual Saliency Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.12099/) (2021)
- [Zoom In and Out: A Mixed-scale Triplet Network for Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02688/) (2022)
- [Convolutional Bypasses Are Better Vision Transformer Adapters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07039/) (2022)
- [Uncertainty-aware Joint Salient Object and Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02628/) (2021)
- [Explicit Visual Prompting for Low-Level Structure Segmentations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10883/) (2023)
- [Label Decoupling Framework for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.11048/) (2020)
- [Auxiliary Tasks in Multi-task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.06334/) (2018)
- [UC-Net: Uncertainty Inspired RGB-D Saliency Detection via Conditional Variational Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05763/) (2020)
- [Feature Shrinkage Pyramid for Camouflaged Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14816/) (2023)
- [High-resolution Iterative Feedback Network for Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11624/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [A Survey of Camouflaged Object Detection and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.14562/) (2024)
- [Explicit Motion Handling and Interactive Prompting for Video Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01968/) (2024)
- [Beyond Single Images: Retrieval Self-Augmented Unsupervised Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.18437/) (2025)
- [Towards Real Zero-Shot Camouflaged Object Segmentation without Camouflaged Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16953/) (2024)
- [Distribution-Specific Learning for Joint Salient and Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06063/) (2025)
- [Discover, Segment, and Select: A Progressive Mechanism for Zero-shot Camouflaged Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.19944/) (2026)
- [Deep Fourier-embedded Network for RGB and Thermal Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18409/) (2024)
- [It's Not the Target, It's the Background: Rethinking Infrared Small Target Detection via Deep Patch-Free Low-Rank Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.10425/) (2025)
- [GAPNet: A Lightweight Framework for Image and Video Salient Object Detection via Granularity-Aware Paradigm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.07585/) (2025)
- [High-Resolution Underwater Camouflaged Object Detection: GBU-UCOD Dataset and Topology-Aware and Frequency-Decoupled Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.03591/) (2026)
- [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)
- [Object-Centric Cropping for Visual Few-Shot Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.00218/) (2025)
- [Towards Size-invariant Salient Object Detection: A Generic Evaluation and Optimization Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.15573/) (2025)
- [Language-Guided Structure-Aware Network for Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.24355/) (2026)
- [Modality-Specific Hierarchical Enhancement for RGB-D Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02935/) (2026)
- [When W4A4 Breaks Camouflaged Object Detection: Token-Group Dual-Constraint Activation Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.16855/) (2026)
- [UniV2D: Bridging Visual Restoration and Semantic Perception for Underwater Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.07146/) (2026)
- [Learning Spatially Adaptive Structural Coordination for Underwater Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.15535/) (2026)
- [Hierarchical Consistency Learning for Test-time Adaptation in Camouflage Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.25651/) (2026)
- [Rethinking Conditional Generation for Underwater Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.01825/) (2026)
- [Effective Receptive Field Ordering Matters for Infrared Small Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.23994/) (2026)
- [Asymmetric Cross-Modal Fine-Grained Visual Categorization: ACF-Net and the BirdPro Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.25520/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Camouflaged object detection (COD) and salient object detection (SOD) are two distinct yet closely-related computer vision tasks widely studied during the past decades. Though sharing the same purpose of segmenting an image into binary foreground and background regions, their distinction lies in the fact that COD focuses on concealed objects hidden in the image, while SOD concentrates on the most prominent objects in the image. Previous works achieved good performance by stacking various hand-designed modules and multi-scale features. However, these carefully-designed complex networks often performed well on one task but not on another. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective network (SENet) based on vision Transformer (ViT), by employing a simple design of an asymmetric ViT-based encoder-decoder structure, we yield competitive results on both tasks, exhibiting greater versatility than meticulously crafted ones. Furthermore, to enhance the Transformer's ability to model local information, which is important for pixel-level binary segmentation tasks, we propose a local information capture module (LICM). We also propose a dynamic weighted loss (DW loss) based on Binary Cross-Entropy (BCE) and Intersection over Union (IoU) loss, which guides the network to pay more attention to those smaller and more difficult-to-find target objects according to their size. Moreover, we explore the issue of joint training of SOD and COD, and propose a preliminary solution to the conflict in joint training, further improving the performance of SOD. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. The code is available at https://github.com/linuxsino/SENet.