Identification of camouflage military individuals with deep learning approaches DFAN and SINETV2

Abstract Camouflaged object detection particularly is considered as challenging and crucial because these objects are designed to either mimic their environment or be completely hidden within it. The goal of camouflage patterns utilization is to help objects blend into their surroundings, making them harder to detect. One of the biggest hurdles is distinguishing the object from the background. Many efforts have been made to tackle this problem all around the globe, and this research builds on those advancements. The focus is on developing methods for detecting camouflaged targets in military settings, including materials, operations, and personnel using convolutional neural network. A key contribution of this work is the MSC1K dataset, which includes 1,000 images of camouflaged people with detailed annotations for object-level and bounding-box segmentation. This dataset can also support broader computer vision tasks like detection, classification, and segmentation. Additionally, this research introduces the Dynamic Feature Aggregation Network (DFAN), a method inspired by previous studies that uses multi-level feature fusion to detect camouflaged soldiers in various conditions. Extensive testing shows that DFAN and SINet-V2 (Search and identification network) achieved the highest accuracy with the least error, while SINet struggles the most. Notably, DFAN shines with its precision-recall balance, while SINET lags behind, potentially due to difficulties in handling intricate saliency patterns. The most intriguing contrast arises in the third setting (MSC1K + CPD), where DFAN remarkably excels, displaying superior structural similarity, strong human-perception alignment, and optimal precision-recall trade-offs. DFAN emerges as the top performer in terms of error minimization, achieving the lowest MAE values: 0.051 for MSC1K, 0.004 for CPD, and 0.028 for the combined dataset. In contrast, SINet shows the highest error rates, making it the Least reliable model, with MAE values of 0.079, 0.157, and 0.049 respectively. ZoomNet and SINetV2 delivered moderate performance; ZoomNet records MAEs of 0.056, 0.005, and 0.029, whereas SINetV2 reports 0.051, 0.005, and 0.027 in the same settings. These results indicated that DFAN and SINetV2 consistently produced more accurate predictions, while SINet has less precision. Overall, the comparative assessment sheds light on how each model adapts to varying datasets, revealing key insights into their performance robustness.