# APGNet: Adaptive Prior-Guided for Underwater Camouflaged Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12056 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.12056/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 21 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [U2-Net: Going Deeper with Nested U-Structure for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.09007/) (2020)
- [Anabranch Network for Camouflaged Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.09451/) (2021)
- [Concealed Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.10274/) (2021)
- [Camouflaged Object Segmentation with Distraction Mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10475/) (2021)
- [Uncertainty-aware Joint Salient Object and Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02628/) (2021)
- [Context-aware Cross-level Fusion Network for Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.12555/) (2021)
- [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)
- [MAS-SAM: Segment Any Marine Animal with Aggregated Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15700/) (2024)
- [Camouflaged Object Detection with Feature Grafting and Distractor Aware](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03943/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [High-Resolution Underwater Camouflaged Object Detection: GBU-UCOD Dataset and Topology-Aware and Frequency-Decoupled Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.03591/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Detecting camouflaged objects in underwater environments is crucial for marine ecological research and resource exploration. However, existing methods face two key challenges: underwater image degradation, including low contrast and color distortion, and the natural camouflage of marine organisms. Traditional image enhancement techniques struggle to restore critical features in degraded images, while camouflaged object detection (COD) methods developed for terrestrial scenes often fail to adapt to underwater environments due to the lack of consideration for underwater optical characteristics. To address these issues, we propose APGNet, an Adaptive Prior-Guided Network, which integrates a Siamese architecture with a novel prior-guided mechanism to enhance robustness and detection accuracy. First, we employ the Multi-Scale Retinex with Color Restoration (MSRCR) algorithm for data augmentation, generating illumination-invariant images to mitigate degradation effects. Second, we design an Extended Receptive Field (ERF) module combined with a Multi-Scale Progressive Decoder (MPD) to capture multi-scale contextual information and refine feature representations. Furthermore, we propose an adaptive prior-guided mechanism that hierarchically fuses position and boundary priors by embedding spatial attention in high-level features for coarse localization and using deformable convolution to refine contours in low-level features. Extensive experimental results on two public MAS datasets demonstrate that our proposed method APGNet outperforms 15 state-of-art methods under widely used evaluation metrics.