# Improving SAM for Camouflaged Object Detection via Dual Stream Adapters

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.06042 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06042/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 71 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [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)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12122/) (2021)
- [Decoupled Weight Decay Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05101/) (2017)
- [BitFit: Simple Parameter-efficient Fine-tuning for Transformer-based Masked Language-models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10199/) (2021)
- [PVT v2: Improved Baselines with Pyramid Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13797/) (2021)
- [Vision Transformer Adapter for Dense Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.08534/) (2022)
- [Medical SAM Adapter: Adapting Segment Anything Model for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12620/) (2023)
- [Structure-measure: A New Way to Evaluate Foreground Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.00786/) (2017)
- [Enhanced-alignment Measure for Binary Foreground Map Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.10421/) (2018)
- [Anabranch Network for Camouflaged Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.09451/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Medical SAM 2: Segment medical images as video via Segment Anything Model 2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00874/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Dual Attention Suppression Attack: Generate Adversarial Camouflage in Physical World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01050/) (2021)
- [Segment Anything Is Not Always Perfect: An Investigation of SAM on Different Real-world Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05750/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Mutual Graph Learning for Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02613/) (2021)
- [Feature Shrinkage Pyramid for Camouflaged Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14816/) (2023)
- [Context-aware Cross-level Fusion Network for Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.12555/) (2021)
- [Specificity-preserving RGB-D Saliency Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08162/) (2021)
- [Deep Gradient Learning for Efficient Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12853/) (2022)
- [SAM2-Adapter: Evaluating & Adapting Segment Anything 2 in Downstream Tasks: Camouflage, Shadow, Medical Image Segmentation, and More](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.04579/) (2024)
- [SAM Fails to Segment Anything? -- SAM-Adapter: Adapting SAM in Underperformed Scenes: Camouflage, Shadow, Medical Image Segmentation, and More](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09148/) (2023)
- [Source-free Depth for Object Pop-out](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05370/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Deep Learning in Concealed Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10979/) (2025)
- [DifferSeg: Towards Diverse Multimodal Binary Segmentation via Differential Perception and Frequency Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.08906/) (2026)
- [CAMotion: A High-Quality Benchmark for Camouflaged Moving Object Detection in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.08287/) (2026)
- [ArgusCogito: Chain-of-Thought for Cross-Modal Synergy and Omnidirectional Reasoning in Camouflaged Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18050/) (2025)
- [DGA-Net: Enhancing SAM with Depth Prompting and Graph-Anchor Guidance for Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.02831/) (2026)
- [IP-SAM: Rethinking Prompt-Conditioned Segmentation for Prompt-Absent Deployment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.27250/) (2026)
- [Modality-Agnostic Prompt Learning for Multi-Modal Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.12380/) (2026)
- [Certainty Is Redundant: Token Sparsification for Efficient Camouflaged Object Detection with Vision Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.16854/) (2026)
- [When W4A4 Breaks Camouflaged Object Detection: Token-Group Dual-Constraint Activation Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.16855/) (2026)
- [RepSAM: Bridging Foundation Models to Robotic Vision via Representation-Guided Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.25495/) (2026)
- [TRUST: Efficient Abdominal Trauma Recognition via Image-to-Ultrasound-Video Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.27777/) (2026)
- [VCP-DCN: Beyond Visual Concealed Property via Depth Collaborative Network for Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.27843/) (2026)
- [Is There Really a Camouflaged Object? Towards Realistic Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.11135/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Segment anything model (SAM) has shown impressive general-purpose segmentation performance on natural images, but its performance on camouflaged object detection (COD) is unsatisfactory. In this paper, we propose SAM-COD that performs camouflaged object detection for RGB-D inputs. While keeping the SAM architecture intact, dual stream adapters are expanded on the image encoder to learn potential complementary information from RGB images and depth images, and fine-tune the mask decoder and its depth replica to perform dual-stream mask prediction. In practice, the dual stream adapters are embedded into the attention block of the image encoder in a parallel manner to facilitate the refinement and correction of the two types of image embeddings. To mitigate channel discrepancies arising from dual stream embeddings that do not directly interact with each other, we augment the association of dual stream embeddings using bidirectional knowledge distillation including a model distiller and a modal distiller. In addition, to predict the masks for RGB and depth attention maps, we hybridize the two types of image embeddings which are jointly learned with the prompt embeddings to update the initial prompt, and then feed them into the mask decoders to synchronize the consistency of image embeddings and prompt embeddings. Experimental results on four COD benchmarks show that our SAM-COD achieves excellent detection performance gains over SAM and achieves state-of-the-art results with a given fine-tuning paradigm.