# Discover, Segment, and Select: A Progressive Mechanism for Zero-shot Camouflaged Object Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.19944 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.19944/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Feb 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [Shikra: Unleashing Multimodal LLM's Referential Dialogue Magic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15195/) (2023)
- [DeepSeek-VL: Towards Real-World Vision-Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05525/) (2024)
- [Structure-measure: A New Way to Evaluate Foreground Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.00786/) (2017)
- [PraNet: Parallel Reverse Attention Network for Polyp Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11392/) (2020)
- [From Louvain to Leiden: guaranteeing well-connected communities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.08473/) (2018)
- [Enhanced-alignment Measure for Binary Foreground Map Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.10421/) (2018)
- [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)
- [High-resolution Iterative Feedback Network for Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11624/) (2022)
- [ZoomNeXt: A Unified Collaborative Pyramid Network for Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.20208/) (2023)
- [Relax Image-Specific Prompt Requirement in SAM: A Single Generic Prompt for Segmenting Camouflaged Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07374/) (2023)
- [A Simple yet Effective Network based on Vision Transformer for Camouflaged Object and Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18922/) (2024)
- [Chain of Visual Perception: Harnessing Multimodal Large Language Models for Zero-shot Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11273/) (2023)
- [Leveraging Hallucinations to Reduce Manual Prompt Dependency in Promptable Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15205/) (2024)
- [Evaluating SAM2's Role in Camouflaged Object Detection: From SAM to SAM2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21596/) (2024)
- [UCOD-DPL: Unsupervised Camouflaged Object Detection via Dynamic Pseudo-label Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07087/) (2025)
- [CGCOD: Class-Guided Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.18977/) (2024)
- [COMPrompter: reconceptualized segment anything model with multiprompt network for camouflaged object detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18858/) (2024)
- [Towards Real Zero-Shot Camouflaged Object Segmentation without Camouflaged Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16953/) (2024)
- [Stepwise Decomposition and Dual-stream Focus: A Novel Approach for Training-free Camouflaged Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.06818/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Is It Time for the Renaissance of Salient Object Detection in the Era of MLLMs?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.29222/) (2026)
- [Certainty Is Redundant: Token Sparsification for Efficient Camouflaged Object Detection with Vision Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.16854/) (2026)
- [Can Frozen Hyperspherical Features Guide the Selection of Pseudo Masks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.30080/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Current zero-shot Camouflaged Object Segmentation methods typically employ a two-stage pipeline (discover-then-segment): using MLLMs to obtain visual prompts, followed by SAM segmentation. However, relying solely on MLLMs for camouflaged object discovery often leads to inaccurate localization, false positives, and missed detections. To address these issues, we propose the Discover-Segment-Select (DSS) mechanism, a progressive framework designed to refine segmentation step by step. The proposed method contains a Feature-coherent Object Discovery (FOD) module that leverages visual features to generate diverse object proposals, a segmentation module that refines these proposals through SAM segmentation, and a Semantic-driven Mask Selection (SMS) module that employs MLLMs to evaluate and select the optimal segmentation mask from multiple candidates. Without requiring any training or supervision, DSS achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple COS benchmarks, especially in multiple-instance scenes.