SAMamba: Adaptive State Space Modeling with Hierarchical Vision for Infrared Small Target Detection
This work addresses a critical problem for military, maritime, and early warning applications by enhancing detection accuracy in infrared surveillance, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing deep learning frameworks.
The paper tackled infrared small target detection, a challenging task due to small target sizes and complex backgrounds, by proposing SAMamba, which integrates hierarchical feature learning with selective sequence modeling, achieving significant performance improvements over state-of-the-art methods on multiple datasets.
Infrared small target detection (ISTD) is vital for long-range surveillance in military, maritime, and early warning applications. ISTD is challenged by targets occupying less than 0.15% of the image and low distinguishability from complex backgrounds. Existing deep learning methods often suffer from information loss during downsampling and inefficient global context modeling. This paper presents SAMamba, a novel framework integrating SAM2's hierarchical feature learning with Mamba's selective sequence modeling. Key innovations include: (1) A Feature Selection Adapter (FS-Adapter) for efficient natural-to-infrared domain adaptation via dual-stage selection (token-level with a learnable task embedding and channel-wise adaptive transformations); (2) A Cross-Channel State-Space Interaction (CSI) module for efficient global context modeling with linear complexity using selective state space modeling; and (3) A Detail-Preserving Contextual Fusion (DPCF) module that adaptively combines multi-scale features with a gating mechanism to balance high-resolution and low-resolution feature contributions. SAMamba addresses core ISTD challenges by bridging the domain gap, maintaining fine-grained details, and efficiently modeling long-range dependencies. Experiments on NUAA-SIRST, IRSTD-1k, and NUDT-SIRST datasets show SAMamba significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, especially in challenging scenarios with heterogeneous backgrounds and varying target scales. Code: https://github.com/zhengshuchen/SAMamba.