Rethinking Infrared Small Target Detection: A Foundation-Driven Efficient Paradigm
While large-scale visual foundation models (VFMs) exhibit strong generalization across diverse visual domains, their potential for single-frame infrared small target (SIRST) detection remains largely unexplored. To fill this gap, we systematically introduce the frozen representations from VFMs into the SIRST task for the first time and propose a Foundation-Driven Efficient Paradigm (FDEP), which can seamlessly adapt to existing encoder-decoder-based methods and significantly improve accuracy without additional inference overhead. Specifically, a Semantic Alignment Modulation Fusion (SAMF) module is designed to achieve dynamic alignment and deep fusion of the global semantic priors from VFMs with task-specific features. Meanwhile, to avoid the inference time burden introduced by VFMs, we propose a Collaborative Optimization-based Implicit Self-Distillation (CO-ISD) strategy, which enables implicit semantic transfer between the main and lightweight branches through parameter sharing and synchronized backpropagation. In addition, to unify the fragmented evaluation system, we construct a Holistic SIRST Evaluation (HSE) metric that performs multi-threshold integral evaluation at both pixel-level confidence and target-level robustness, providing a stable and comprehensive basis for fair model comparison. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the SIRST detection networks equipped with our FDEP framework achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on multiple public datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/YuChuang1205/FDEP-Framework
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Breaking Self-Attention Failure: Rethinking Query Initialization for Infrared Small Target Detection
Infrared small target detection (IRSTD) faces significant challenges due to the low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), small target size, and complex cluttered backgrounds. Although recent DETR-based detectors benefit from glo…
Rethinking IRSTD: Single-Point Supervision Guided Encoder-only Framework is Enough for Infrared Small Target Detection
Infrared small target detection (IRSTD) aims to separate small targets from clutter backgrounds. Extensive research is dedicated to the pixel-level supervision-guided "encoder-decoder" segmentation paradigm. Although hav…
Rethinking Evaluation of Infrared Small Target Detection
As an essential vision task, infrared small target detection (IRSTD) has seen significant advancements through deep learning. However, critical limitations in current evaluation protocols impede further progress. First, …
It's Not the Target, It's the Background: Rethinking Infrared Small Target Detection via Deep Patch-Free Low-Rank Representations
Infrared small target detection (IRSTD) remains a long-standing challenge in complex backgrounds due to low signal-to-clutter ratios (SCR), diverse target morphologies, and the absence of distinctive visual cues. While r…
Computational EfficiencySPIRIT: Adapting Vision Foundation Models for Unified Single- and Multi-Frame Infrared Small Target Detection
Infrared small target detection (IRSTD) is crucial for surveillance and early-warning, with deployments spanning both single-frame analysis and video-mode tracking. A practical solution should leverage vision foundation …