Mamba-based Spatio-Frequency Motion Perception for Video Camouflaged Object Detection

Existing video camouflaged object detection (VCOD) methods primarily rely on spatial appearances for motion perception. However, the high foreground-background similarity in VCOD limits the discriminability of such features (e.g. color and texture). Recent studies demonstrate that frequency features can not only compensate for appearance limitations, but also perceive motion through dynamic variations in spectral energy. Meanwhile, the emerging state space model called Mamba enables efficient motion perception in frame sequences with its linear-time long-sequence modeling capability. Motivated by this, we propose Vcamba, a visual camouflage Mamba based on spatio-frequency motion perception that integrates frequency and spatial features for efficient and accurate VCOD. Specifically, by analyzing the spatial representations of frequency components, we reveal a structural evolution pattern that emerges from the ordered superposition of components. Based on this observation, we propose a unique frequency-domain sequential scanning (FSS) strategy to unfold the spectrum. Utilizing FSS, the adaptive frequency enhancement (AFE) module employs Mamba to model the causal dependencies within sequences, enabling effective frequency learning. Furthermore, we propose a space-based long-range motion perception (SLMP) module and a frequency-based long-range motion perception (FLMP) module to model spatio-temporal and frequency-temporal sequences. Finally, the space and frequency motion fusion module (SFMF) integrates dual-domain features into unified motion representation. Experiments show that Vcamba outperforms state-of-the-art methods across 6 evaluation metrics on 2 datasets with lower computation cost, confirming its superiority. Code is available at: https://github.com/BoydeLi/Vcamba.