Mixture-of-Queries Transformer: Camouflaged Instance Segmentation via Queries Cooperation and Frequency Enhancement

Weiwei Feng, Nanqing Xu, Tengfei Liu, Weiqiang Wang

Abstract: Due to the high similarity between camouflaged instances and the surroundings and the widespread camouflage-like scenarios, the recently proposed camouflaged instance segmentation (CIS) is a challenging and relevant task. Previous approaches achieve some progress on CIS, while many overlook camouflaged objects’ color and contour nature and then decide on each candidate instinctively. In this paper, we contribute a Mixture-of-Queries Transformer (MoQT) in an end-to-end manner for CIS based on two key designs (a Frequency Enhancement Feature Extractor and a Mixture-of-Queries Decoder). First, the Frequency Enhancement Feature Extractor is responsible for capturing the camouflaged clues in the frequency domain. To expose camouflaged instances, the extractor enhances the effectiveness of contour, eliminates the interference color, and obtains suitable features simultaneously. Second, a Mixture-of-Queries Decoder utilizes multiple newly initialized experts of queries (a group of queries considered an expert) in each layer for spotting camouflaged characteristics with cooperation. These experts collaborate to generate outputs with the mixture-of-queries mechanism, refined hierarchically to a fine-grained level for more accurate instance masks. Coupling these two components enables MoQT to use multiple experts to integrate effective clues of camouflaged objects in both spatial and frequency domains. Extensive experimental results demonstrate our MoQT outperforms 19 state-of-the-art CIS approaches on both COD10K and NC4K datasets.

External IDs:dblp:conf/ijcai/FengXL025