# RIDE: Retinex-Informed Decoupling for Exposing Concealed Objects

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15450 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.15450/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 40 of its 71 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Masked-attention Mask Transformer for Universal Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01527/) (2021)
- [Deep Retinex Decomposition for Low-Light Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.04560/) (2018)
- [PraNet: Parallel Reverse Attention Network for Polyp Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11392/) (2020)
- [Global Filter Networks for Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00645/) (2021)
- [Anabranch Network for Camouflaged Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.09451/) (2021)
- [Concealed Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.10274/) (2021)
- [Learning in the Frequency Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.12416/) (2020)
- [Polyp-PVT: Polyp Segmentation with Pyramid Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06932/) (2021)
- [Zoom In and Out: A Mixed-scale Triplet Network for Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02688/) (2022)
- [Mutual Graph Learning for Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02613/) (2021)
- [High-resolution Iterative Feedback Network for Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11624/) (2022)
- [Reti-Diff: Illumination Degradation Image Restoration with Retinex-based Latent Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11638/) (2023)
- [Implicit Motion Handling for Video Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.07363/) (2022)
- [CamoFormer: Masked Separable Attention for Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06570/) (2022)
- [VSCode: General Visual Salient and Camouflaged Object Detection with 2D Prompt Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15011/) (2023)
- [Enhanced Boundary Learning for Glass-like Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15734/) (2021)
- [ZoomNeXt: A Unified Collaborative Pyramid Network for Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.20208/) (2023)
- [Advances in Deep Concealed Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11234/) (2023)
- [IRSAM: Advancing Segment Anything Model for Infrared Small Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07520/) (2024)
- [Frequency-Spatial Entanglement Learning for Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.01686/) (2024)
- [Frequency Perception Network for Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08924/) (2023)
- [A Survey of Camouflaged Object Detection and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.14562/) (2024)
- [HQG-Net: Unpaired Medical Image Enhancement with High-Quality Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07829/) (2023)
- [PEM: Prototype-based Efficient MaskFormer for Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.19422/) (2024)
- [MEGANet: Multi-Scale Edge-Guided Attention Network for Weak Boundary Polyp Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03329/) (2023)
- [RUN: Reversible Unfolding Network for Concealed Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.18783/) (2025)
- [SAM-COD: SAM-guided Unified Framework for Weakly-Supervised Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10760/) (2024)
- [UnfoldIR: Rethinking Deep Unfolding Network in Illumination Degradation Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.06683/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.