# First RAG, Second SEG: A Training-Free Paradigm for Camouflaged Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15313 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.15313/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Aug 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [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)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [Structure-measure: A New Way to Evaluate Foreground Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.00786/) (2017)
- [Anabranch Network for Camouflaged Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.09451/) (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)
- [Camouflaged Object Segmentation with Distraction Mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10475/) (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)
- [Source-free Depth for Object Pop-out](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05370/) (2022)
- [Advances in Deep Concealed Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11234/) (2023)
- [Fast Camouflaged Object Detection via Edge-based Reversible Re-calibration Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.03216/) (2021)
- [Boosting Camouflaged Object Detection with Dual-Task Interactive Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10579/) (2022)
- [CamoDiffusion: Camouflaged Object Detection via Conditional Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17932/) (2023)
- [Leveraging Hallucinations to Reduce Manual Prompt Dependency in Promptable Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15205/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Camouflaged object detection (COD) poses a significant challenge in computer vision due to the high similarity between objects and their backgrounds. Existing approaches often rely on heavy training and large computational resources. While foundation models such as the Segment Anything Model (SAM) offer strong generalization, they still struggle to handle COD tasks without fine-tuning and require high-quality prompts to yield good performance. However, generating such prompts manually is costly and inefficient. To address these challenges, we propose First RAG, Second SEG (RAG-SEG), a training-free paradigm that decouples COD into two stages: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) for generating coarse masks as prompts, followed by SAM-based segmentation (SEG) for refinement. RAG-SEG constructs a compact retrieval database via unsupervised clustering, enabling fast and effective feature retrieval. During inference, the retrieved features produce pseudo-labels that guide precise mask generation using SAM2. Our method eliminates the need for conventional training while maintaining competitive performance. Extensive experiments on benchmark COD datasets demonstrate that RAG-SEG performs on par with or surpasses state-of-the-art methods. Notably, all experiments are conducted on a personal laptop, highlighting the computational efficiency and practicality of our approach. We present further analysis in the Appendix, covering limitations, salient object detection extension, and possible improvements. textcolorblue Code: https://github.com/Lwt-diamond/RAG-SEG.