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.
Visible-infrared (VIS-IR) alignment is a key pre-training task for robust multi-sensor perception. Most existing methods use uniform patch-wise contrastive learning, but this can be unreliable in VIS-IR data because imaging-physics differences make some spatially paired regions inherently less comparable, and aligning them with equal strength hinders representation learning and downstream transfer.
The paper introduces DOD-SA, a framework for infrared-visible object detection that uses only single-modality annotations. It employs a Collaborative Teacher-Student Network with a single-modality branch and a dual-modality decoupled branch to transfer knowledge across modalities, and a Progressive and Self‑Tuning Training Strategy to refine pseudo‑labels. A Pseudo Label Assigner is also designed to align labels between modalities during training.
By Hang Jin, Chenqiang Gao, Junjie Guo, Fangcen Liu, Qinyao Chang, Kanghui Tian, Deyu Meng
ADGNet introduces an Asymmetric Dual-text Guided Network for infrared small target detection, addressing challenges of pixel-level methods and multimodal approaches that lack regional guidance. It employs an Asymmetric Dual-text Prompt (ADP) with an abstract target prompt and a detailed background prompt, and an Asymmetric Dual-Branch Interaction (ADBI) module to guide visual features separately, followed by an Adaptive Feature Aggregation (AFA) module for dynamic fusion. The authors also create an Asymmetric Image-Text Infrared (AITIR) dataset with asymmetric text annotations for three public datasets, and show that ADGNet outperforms 21 state‑of‑the‑art methods.
By Tongtong Wang, Mingzhu Xu, Chenglong Yu, Jing Wang, Xiaohui Lin, Weili Guan
arXiv:2608.20754v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Promptable segmentation models provide a reusable interface, but direct transfer to automatic infrared small-target segmentation (IRSTD) exposes a mism...
By Aji Mao, Zhenming Peng, Bailin Mu, Tian Pu
SPARK‑SAM is a new approach that adapts the Segment‑Anything Model (SAM) for infrared small‑target segmentation by learning target‑domain response knowledge and conditioning the decoder with an image‑conditioned joint self‑prompt state. In experiments on three IRSTD benchmarks, SPARK‑SAM achieves IoU scores of 75.78%, 86.49%, and 68.34% with only 0.726 M additional parameters, outperforming 14 retrained SAM variants. The method combines benchmark‑mask supervision with reliability‑aware response guidance, and ablations show consistent accuracy gains from response guidance and high‑resolution prompt refinement.
By Aji Mao, Zhenming Peng, Bailin Mu, Tian Pu