# Beyond Single Images: Retrieval Self-Augmented Unsupervised Camouflaged Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18437 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.18437/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 62 of its 92 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 62)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [Billion-scale similarity search with GPUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08734/) (2017)
- [Improving language models by retrieving from trillions of tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04426/) (2021)
- [Vision Transformers Need Registers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16588/) (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)
- [Localizing Objects with Self-Supervised Transformers and no Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.14279/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Cut and Learn for Unsupervised Object Detection and Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11320/) (2023)
- [Self-Supervised Transformers for Unsupervised Object Discovery using Normalized Cut](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.11539/) (2022)
- [Camouflaged Object Segmentation with Distraction Mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10475/) (2021)
- [Deep Spectral Methods: A Surprisingly Strong Baseline for Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.07839/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Weakly-Supervised Concealed Object Segmentation with SAM-based Pseudo Labeling and Multi-scale Feature Grouping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11003/) (2023)
- [The Fast Bilateral Solver](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.03296/) (2015)
- [Feature Shrinkage Pyramid for Camouflaged Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14816/) (2023)
- [High-resolution Iterative Feedback Network for Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11624/) (2022)
- [Diffusion Models in Low-Level Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11138/) (2024)
- [Boundary-Guided Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.00794/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Object Localization: Observing the Background to Discover Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07834/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [RealCamo: Boosting Real Camouflage Synthesis with Layout Controls and Textual-Visual Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.22974/) (2025)
- [EReCu: Pseudo-label Evolution Fusion and Refinement with Multi-Cue Learning for Unsupervised Camouflage Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.11521/) (2026)
- [CAMotion: A High-Quality Benchmark for Camouflaged Moving Object Detection in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.08287/) (2026)
- [Bi-CamoDiffusion: A Boundary-informed Diffusion Approach for Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.13357/) (2026)
- [Can Frozen Hyperspherical Features Guide the Selection of Pseudo Masks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.30080/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

At the core of Camouflaged Object Detection (COD) lies segmenting objects from their highly similar surroundings. Previous efforts navigate this challenge primarily through image-level modeling or annotation-based optimization. Despite advancing considerably, this commonplace practice hardly taps valuable dataset-level contextual information or relies on laborious annotations. In this paper, we propose RISE, a RetrIeval SElf-augmented paradigm that exploits the entire training dataset to generate pseudo-labels for single images, which could be used to train COD models. RISE begins by constructing prototype libraries for environments and camouflaged objects using training images (without ground truth), followed by K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) retrieval to generate pseudo-masks for each image based on these libraries. It is important to recognize that using only training images without annotations exerts a pronounced challenge in crafting high-quality prototype libraries. In this light, we introduce a Clustering-then-Retrieval (CR) strategy, where coarse masks are first generated through clustering, facilitating subsequent histogram-based image filtering and cross-category retrieval to produce high-confidence prototypes. In the KNN retrieval stage, to alleviate the effect of artifacts in feature maps, we propose Multi-View KNN Retrieval (MVKR), which integrates retrieval results from diverse views to produce more robust and precise pseudo-masks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RISE outperforms state-of-the-art unsupervised and prompt-based methods. Code is available at https://github.com/xiaohainku/RISE.