LiteCOD: Lightweight Camouflaged Object Detection via Holistic Understanding of Local-Global Features and Multi-Scale Fusion

Camouflaged object detection (COD) represents one of the most challenging tasks in computer vision, requiring sophisticated approaches to accurately extract objects that seamlessly blend within visually similar backgrounds. While contemporary techniques demonstrate promising detection performance, they predominantly suffer from computational complexity and resource requirements that severely limit their deployment in real-time applications, particularly on mobile devices and edge computing platforms. To address these limitations, we propose LiteCOD, an efficient lightweight framework that integrates local and global perceptions through holistic feature fusion and specially designed efficient attention mechanisms. Our approach achieves superior detection accuracy while maintaining computational efficiency essential for practical deployment, with enhanced feature propagation and minimal computational overhead. Extensive experiments validate LiteCOD’s effectiveness, demonstrating that it surpasses existing lightweight methods with average improvements of 7.55% in the F-measure and 8.08% overall performance gain across three benchmark datasets. Our results indicate that our framework consistently outperforms 20 state-of-the-art methods across quantitative metrics, computational efficiency, and overall performance while achieving real-time inference capabilities with a significantly reduced parameter count of 5.15M parameters. LiteCOD establishes a practical solution bridging the gap between detection accuracy and deployment feasibility in resource-constrained environments.