RIDE: Retinex-Informed Decoupling for Exposing Concealed Objects

Concealed Object Segmentation (COS) encompasses a family of dense-prediction tasks, including camouflaged object detection, polyp segmentation, transparent object detection, and industrial defect inspection, where targets are visually entangled with their surroundings through different physical mechanisms. Existing methods either operate directly on RGB images or employ heterogeneous decompositions (eg, Fourier, wavelet) that redistribute spatial evidence across scale/frequency coefficients, making pixel-aligned cues less direct. We introduce a fundamentally different perspective: homogeneous image decomposition via Retinex theory, which factorizes an image into illumination and reflectance components within the same spatial domain. Our key insight is that visual entanglement enforces appearance matching in the composite space, but this does not necessitate simultaneous matching in both component spaces, a phenomenon we formalize as the Discriminability Gap Theorem. Crucially, we show that across diverse COS sub-tasks, the underlying physical processes systematically anti-correlate illumination and reflectance differences, yielding theoretical guarantees that Retinex decomposition preserves or strictly improves total foreground--background discriminability across the full physical regime, with anti-correlation maximizing the gain. Building on this, we propose RIDE comprising: (i) a Task-Driven Retinex Decomposition module that learns segmentation-optimal factorizations end-to-end; (ii) a Discriminability Gap Attention mechanism that adaptively exploits where decomposition helps; and (iii) a Camouflage-Breaking Contrastive loss operating in reflectance feature space.