Retrospective Memory for Camouflaged Object Detection

Camouflaged object detection (COD) primarily focuses on learning subtle yet discriminative representations from complex scenes. Existing methods predominantly follow the parametric feedforward architecture based on static visual representation modeling. However, they lack explicit mechanisms for acquiring historical context, limiting their adaptation and effectiveness in handling challenging camouflage scenes. In this paper, we propose a recall-augmented COD architecture, namely RetroMem, which dynamically modulates camouflage pattern perception and inference by integrating relevant historical knowledge into the process. Specifically, RetroMem employs a two-stage training paradigm consisting of a learning stage and a recall stage to construct, update, and utilize memory representations effectively. During the learning stage, we design a dense multi-scale adapter (DMA) to improve the pretrained encoder's capability to capture rich multi-scale visual information with very few trainable parameters, thereby providing foundational inferences. In the recall stage, we propose a dynamic memory mechanism (DMM) and an inference pattern reconstruction (IPR). These components fully leverage the latent relationships between learned knowledge and current sample context to reconstruct the inference of camouflage patterns, thereby significantly improving the model's understanding of camouflage scenes. Extensive experiments on several widely used datasets demonstrate that our RetroMem significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.