Local Contrast and Global Contextual Information Make Infrared Small Object Salient Again
This work addresses infrared small object detection, a critical task for applications like surveillance and remote sensing, by improving accuracy with a novel deep learning approach.
The paper tackled the challenge of detecting small objects in infrared images by proposing UCFNet, which uses central difference convolution to capture local contrast and fast Fourier convolution for global context, achieving state-of-the-art performance on public datasets.
Infrared small object detection (ISOS) aims to segment small objects only covered with several pixels from clutter background in infrared images. It's of great challenge due to: 1) small objects lack of sufficient intensity, shape and texture information; 2) small objects are easily lost in the process where detection models, say deep neural networks, obtain high-level semantic features and image-level receptive fields through successive downsampling. This paper proposes a reliable detection model for ISOS, dubbed UCFNet, which can handle well the two issues. It builds upon central difference convolution (CDC) and fast Fourier convolution (FFC). On one hand, CDC can effectively guide the network to learn the contrast information between small objects and the background, as the contrast information is very essential in human visual system dealing with the ISOS task. On the other hand, FFC can gain image-level receptive fields and extract global information while preventing small objects from being overwhelmed.Experiments on several public datasets demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art ISOS models, and can provide useful guidelines for designing better ISOS deep models. Code are available at https://github.com/wcyjerry/BasicISOS.