CamDiff: Camouflage Image Augmentation via Diffusion

The burgeoning field of Camouflaged Object Detection (COD) seeks to identify objects that blend into their surroundings. Despite the impressive performance of recent learning-based models, their robustness is limited, as existing methods may misclassify salient objects as camouflaged ones, despite these contradictory characteristics. This limitation may stem from the lack of multi-pattern training images, leading to reduced robustness against salient objects. To overcome the scarcity of multi-pattern training images, we introduce CamDiff, a novel approach inspired by AI-Generated Content (AIGC). Specifically, we leverage a latent diffusion model to synthesize salient objects in camouflaged scenes, while using the zero-shot image classification ability of the Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) model to prevent synthesis failures and ensure that the synthesized objects align with the input prompt. Consequently, the synthesized image retains its original camouflage label while incorporating salient objects, yielding camouflaged scenes with richer characteristics. The results of user studies show that the salient objects in our synthesized scenes attract the user’s attention more; thus, such samples pose a greater challenge to the existing COD models. Our CamDiff enables flexible editing and effcient large-scale dataset generation at a low cost. It significantly enhances the training and testing phases of COD baselines, granting them robustness across diverse domains. Our newly generated datasets and source code are available at https://github.com/drlxj/CamDiff.