STMDNet: A Lightweight Directional Framework for Motion Pattern Recognition of Tiny Targets
This addresses a fundamental challenge in computer vision for applications like surveillance or robotics, offering a model-based approach with significant performance improvements, though it is incremental as it builds on prior STMD models.
The paper tackles the problem of recognizing motions of tiny targets (few dozen pixels) in cluttered backgrounds by proposing STMDNet, a lightweight directional framework that improves AUC by 24% and achieves up to 19% mF1 gains across various speeds while running at 87 FPS on a single CPU thread.
Recognizing motions of tiny targets - only few dozen pixels - in cluttered backgrounds remains a fundamental challenge when standard feature-based or deep learning methods fail under scarce visual cues. We propose STMDNet, a model-based computational framework to Recognize motions of tiny targets at variable velocities under low-sampling frequency scenarios. STMDNet designs a novel dual-dynamics-and-correlation mechanism, harnessing ipsilateral excitation to integrate target cues and leakage-enhancing-type contralateral inhibition to suppress large-object and background motion interference. Moreover, we develop the first collaborative directional encoding-decoding strategy that determines the motion direction from only one correlation per spatial location, cutting computational costs to one-eighth of prior methods. Further, simply substituting the backbone of a strong STMD model with STMDNet raises AUC by 24%, yielding an enhanced STMDNet-F. Evaluations on real-world low sampling frequency datasets show state-of-the-art results, surpassing the deep learning baseline. Across diverse speeds, STMDNet-F improves mF1 by 19%, 16%, and 8% at 240Hz, 120Hz, and 60Hz, respectively, while STMDNet achieves 87 FPS on a single CPU thread. These advances highlight STMDNet as a next-generation backbone for tiny target motion pattern recognition and underscore its broader potential to revitalize model-based visual approaches in motion detection.