Asymmetric Contextual Modulation for Infrared Small Target Detection

Abstract

Single-frame infrared small target detection remains a challenge not only due to the scarcity of intrinsic target characteristics but also because of lacking a public dataset. In this paper, we first contribute an open dataset with high-quality annotations to advance the research in this field. We also propose an asymmetric contextual modulation module specially designed for detecting infrared small targets. To better highlight small targets, besides a top-down global contextual feedback, we supplement a bottom-up modulation pathway based on point-wise channel attention for exchanging high-level semantics and subtle low-level details. We report ablation studies and comparisons to state-of-the-art methods, where we find that our approach performs significantly better. Our dataset and code are available online.

Publication
2021 IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV)
Yimian Dai
Yimian Dai
Postdoctoral Fellow

My research interests include image restoration, object detection, and vision-language models.

Fei Zhou
Fei Zhou
Lecturer

My research interests include image enhancement, small target detection, and low-rank sparse decomposition.