# Promoting SAM for Camouflaged Object Detection via Selective Key Point-based Guidance

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.09123 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09123/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [Learning to Prompt for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01134/) (2021)
- [Pre-train, Prompt, and Predict: A Systematic Survey of Prompting Methods in Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13586/) (2021)
- [Visual Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12119/) (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)
- [Inpaint Anything: Segment Anything Meets Image Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06790/) (2023)
- [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)
- [RSPrompter: Learning to Prompt for Remote Sensing Instance Segmentation based on Visual Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16269/) (2023)
- [Zoom In and Out: A Mixed-scale Triplet Network for Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02688/) (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)
- [Mutual Graph Learning for Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02613/) (2021)
- [Can SAM Segment Anything? When SAM Meets Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04709/) (2023)
- [Understanding and Improving Visual Prompting: A Label-Mapping Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11635/) (2022)
- [Feature Shrinkage Pyramid for Camouflaged Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14816/) (2023)
- [Visual Prompt Tuning for Generative Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.00990/) (2022)
- [SAM Struggles in Concealed Scenes -- Empirical Study on Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06022/) (2023)
- [BlackVIP: Black-Box Visual Prompting for Robust Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14773/) (2023)
- [Boundary-Guided Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.00794/) (2022)
- [How to Efficiently Adapt Large Segmentation Model(SAM) to Medical Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13731/) (2023)
- [SAMAug: Point Prompt Augmentation for Segment Anything Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01187/) (2023)
- [Application of Segment Anything Model for Civil Infrastructure Defect Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12600/) (2023)
- [Focused and Collaborative Feedback Integration for Interactive Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11880/) (2023)
- [Deep learning universal crater detection using Segment Anything Model (SAM)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07764/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Big model has emerged as a new research paradigm that can be applied to various down-stream tasks with only minor effort for domain adaption. Correspondingly, this study tackles Camouflaged Object Detection (COD) leveraging the Segment Anything Model (SAM). The previous studies declared that SAM is not workable for COD but this study reveals that SAM works if promoted properly, for which we devise a new framework to render point promotions: First, we develop the Promotion Point Targeting Network (PPT-net) to leverage multi-scale features in predicting the probabilities of camouflaged objects' presences at given candidate points over the image. Then, we develop a key point selection (KPS) algorithm to deploy both positive and negative point promotions contrastively to SAM to guide the segmentation. It is the first work to facilitate big model for COD and achieves plausible results experimentally over the existing methods on 3 data sets under 6 metrics. This study demonstrates an off-the-shelf methodology for COD by leveraging SAM, which gains advantage over designing professional models from scratch, not only in performance, but also in turning the problem to a less challenging task, that is, seeking informative but not exactly precise promotions.