Dynamic High-frequency Convolution for Infrared Small Target Detection

Infrared small target detection (IRSTD) plays a pivotal role in a broad spectrum of mission-critical applications, including maritime surveillance, military search and rescue, early warning systems, and precision-guided strikes, all of which demand the precise identification of dim, sub-pixel targets amid highly cluttered infrared backgrounds. Despite significant progress driven by deep learning methods, fundamental challenges persist: infrared small targets occupy extremely limited spatial extents (often only a few pixels), exhibit low signal-to-clutter ratios, and are easily confused with structurally complex backgrounds that frequently induce false alarms. Existing encoder-decoder architectures suffer from two key limitations - an information bottleneck in early convolutional stages that undermines fine-grained target perception, and static skip connections that lack the dynamic adaptability required to discriminate between genuine targets and pseudo-target regions. To address these challenges, we propose SANet, a Selective Attention-based Network built upon the classical U-Net framework and augmented with two novel components: (1) a \emph{Dual-path Semantic-aware Module} (DSM) that integrates standard convolutions for local spatial detail preservation with pinwheel-shaped convolutions for expanded, direction-sensitive receptive fields, followed by a Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) for fine-grained spatial-channel feature recalibration; and (2) a \emph{Selective Attention Fusion Module} (SAFM) that replaces conventional static skip connections with a spatially adaptive, learnable weighting mechanism to perform context-aware, cross-scale feature fusion.

Infrared small target detection (IRSTD) in high-resolution images is crucial for many practical applications, such as surveillance of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and UAV-based ground monitoring. However, IRSTD remains challenging due to the small size and weak features of targets, as well as significant interference from complex dynamic backgrounds. Existing detection methods often suffer from redundant computations on non-target background regions and insufficient exploitation of target context information, which limits their performance in complex backgrounds. To address these issues, we propose an efficient coarse-to-fine infrared small target detection framework with attention prior-guided knowledge distillation, termed ECFNet. In the coarse stage, we design a region binary classification network (RBCN) on grid-based multi-scale feature maps to efficiently recognize target-containing context region proposals. Moreover, we introduce a novel denoising-assisted training strategy that incorporates noisy ground-truth (GT) masks into RBCN feature maps and trains the network to reconstruct the original GT masks through a denoising task, thereby encouraging it to explicitly learn target-background context and thus better distinguish target proposals from background regions. In the fine stage, we customize a lightweight target detector to the coarse stage's region proposals for balancing accuracy and efficiency. Furthermore, we propose a knowledge distillation strategy guided by the teacher-student cross-attention prior. This mechanism directs the student to focus on critical target regions, thereby enhancing the discriminative feature representation for infrared small targets. Extensive experiments on three real infrared datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms both existing single-stage and two-stage approaches while maintaining high real-time processing efficiency.

Infrared small target detection (IRSTD) remains challenging due to tiny target size, low signal-to-noise ratio, severe foreground-background imbalance, and blurred boundaries in complex scenes. Existing methods usually rely on post-activation probability-domain supervision for discrimination, where weak targets and strong clutter may produce saturated and close probabilities, limiting weak-target discrimination. Meanwhile, blurred boundaries and halo-like predictions mainly stem from thermal diffusion, tiny target scale, boundary uncertainty, and insufficient explicit contour constraints. To address these issues, we propose Adaptive-Contrastive SLSIoU (AC-SLSIoU), a plug-and-play discriminative and shape-aware loss for IRSTD. Specifically, a Logit-Domain Margin Constraint (LDMC) is introduced to enlarge the response gap between targets and informative hard negatives in the logit space, thereby enhancing weak-target discrimination. Adaptive Boundary Suppression (ABS) applies scale-aware annular penalties to refine target contours and suppress halo-like overflow responses. In addition, False-Alarm Focal Loss assigns larger weights to high-probability negative samples, further penalizing persistent high-confidence false alarms. Without introducing extra inference overhead, the proposed method can be seamlessly integrated into existing detectors and consistently improves both detection accuracy and shape quality. Extensive experiments and cross-backbone evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness, robustness, and generalization ability of the proposed method for infrared small target detection.