Compared to fully supervised object detection, training with sparse annotations typically leads to a decline in performance due to insufficient feature diversity. Existing sparsely annotated object detection (SAOD) methods often rely on pseudo-labeling strategies, but these pseudo-labels tend to introduce noise under extreme sparsity. To simultaneously avoid the impact of pseudo-label noise and enhance feature diversity, we propose a novel Adaptive Feature Generation (AdaptFG) model that generates features based on class names. This model integrates a pre-trained CLIP into a VAE-based feature generator, with its core innovation being an Adaptor that adaptively maps CLIP’s semantic embeddings to the object detector domain. Additionally, we introduce inter-class relationship reasoning in detector, which effectively mitigates misclassifications stemming from similar features. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that AdaptFG consistently outperforms state-of-the-art SAOD methods on the PASCAL VOC and MS COCO benchmarks.

Camouflaged object detection (COD) is a challenging task that identifies camouflaged objects from highly similar backgrounds. Existing methods typically treat the whole object equally while neglecting the indistinguishable regions that require more attention than other regions. In this paper, we propose a Fuzzy Boundary-Guided Network (FBG-Net) for camouflaged object detection, which mimics the human behavior that pays more attention to these low-confidence regions when observing objects. Specifically, we devise two main building blocks: (1) Mixed Semantics Aggregation Module (MSAM) to integrate boundary and texture features cumulatively in the high-to-low scales, and (2) Fuzzy Boundary-Guided Module (FBGM) to locate and enhance the low-confidence regions under the guidance of fuzzy boundary. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of FBG-Net with superior performance to existing state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/YAOSL98/FBG-Net.

It is challenging to accurately detect camouflaged objects from their highly similar surroundings. Existing methods mainly leverage a single-stage detection fashion, while neglecting small objects with low-resolution fine edges requires more operations than the larger ones. To tackle camouflaged object detection (COD), we are inspired by humans attention coupled with the coarse-to-fine detection strategy, and thereby propose an iterative refinement framework, coined SegMaR, which integrates Segment, Magnify and Reiterate in a multi-stage detection fashion. Specifically, we design a new discriminative mask which makes the model attend on the fixation and edge regions. In addition, we leverage an attention-based sampler to magnify the object region progressively with no need of enlarging the image size. Extensive experiments show our SegMaR achieves remarkable and consistent improvements over other state-of-the-art methods. Especially, we surpass two competitive methods 7.4% and 20.0% respectively in average over standard evaluation metrics on small camouflaged objects. Additional studies provide more promising insights into Seg-MaR, including its effectiveness on the discriminative mask and its generalization to other network architectures. Code is available at https://github.com/dlut-dimt/SegMaR.