You Only Look Omni Gradient Backpropagation for Moving Infrared Small Target Detection
This work addresses a key challenge in infrared search and tracking systems, offering a novel solution for detecting small targets in infrared imagery, though it is incremental in improving feature learning within an existing framework.
The paper tackles the problem of moving infrared small target detection by addressing ambiguous per-frame feature representations, proposing BP-FPN, a backpropagation-driven feature pyramid architecture that achieves new state-of-the-art performance on multiple public datasets.
Moving infrared small target detection is a key component of infrared search and tracking systems, yet it remains extremely challenging due to low signal-to-clutter ratios, severe target-background imbalance, and weak discriminative features. Existing deep learning methods primarily focus on spatio-temporal feature aggregation, but their gains are limited, revealing that the fundamental bottleneck lies in ambiguous per-frame feature representations rather than spatio-temporal modeling itself. Motivated by this insight, we propose BP-FPN, a backpropagation-driven feature pyramid architecture that fundamentally rethinks feature learning for small target. BP-FPN introduces Gradient-Isolated Low-Level Shortcut (GILS) to efficiently incorporate fine-grained target details without inducing shortcut learning, and Directional Gradient Regularization (DGR) to enforce hierarchical feature consistency during backpropagation. The design is theoretically grounded, introduces negligible computational overhead, and can be seamlessly integrated into existing frameworks. Extensive experiments on multiple public datasets show that BP-FPN consistently establishes new state-of-the-art performance. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first FPN designed for this task entirely from the backpropagation perspective.