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Main Authors: Yu, Chuang, Zhao, Jinmiao, Liu, Yunpeng, Li, Yaokun, Shu, Xiujun, Feng, Yuanhao, Wang, Bo, Dai, Yimian, Yue, Xiangyu
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.05511
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author Yu, Chuang
Zhao, Jinmiao
Liu, Yunpeng
Li, Yaokun
Shu, Xiujun
Feng, Yuanhao
Wang, Bo
Dai, Yimian
Yue, Xiangyu
author_facet Yu, Chuang
Zhao, Jinmiao
Liu, Yunpeng
Li, Yaokun
Shu, Xiujun
Feng, Yuanhao
Wang, Bo
Dai, Yimian
Yue, Xiangyu
contents While large-scale visual foundation models (VFMs) exhibit strong generalization across diverse visual domains, their potential for single-frame infrared small target (SIRST) detection remains largely unexplored. To fill this gap, we systematically introduce the frozen representations from VFMs into the SIRST task for the first time and propose a Foundation-Driven Efficient Paradigm (FDEP), which can seamlessly adapt to existing encoder-decoder-based methods and significantly improve accuracy without additional inference overhead. Specifically, a Semantic Alignment Modulation Fusion (SAMF) module is designed to achieve dynamic alignment and deep fusion of the global semantic priors from VFMs with task-specific features. Meanwhile, to avoid the inference time burden introduced by VFMs, we propose a Collaborative Optimization-based Implicit Self-Distillation (CO-ISD) strategy, which enables implicit semantic transfer between the main and lightweight branches through parameter sharing and synchronized backpropagation. In addition, to unify the fragmented evaluation system, we construct a Holistic SIRST Evaluation (HSE) metric that performs multi-threshold integral evaluation at both pixel-level confidence and target-level robustness, providing a stable and comprehensive basis for fair model comparison. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the SIRST detection networks equipped with our FDEP framework achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on multiple public datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/YuChuang1205/FDEP-Framework
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_05511
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Rethinking Infrared Small Target Detection: A Foundation-Driven Efficient Paradigm
Yu, Chuang
Zhao, Jinmiao
Liu, Yunpeng
Li, Yaokun
Shu, Xiujun
Feng, Yuanhao
Wang, Bo
Dai, Yimian
Yue, Xiangyu
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
While large-scale visual foundation models (VFMs) exhibit strong generalization across diverse visual domains, their potential for single-frame infrared small target (SIRST) detection remains largely unexplored. To fill this gap, we systematically introduce the frozen representations from VFMs into the SIRST task for the first time and propose a Foundation-Driven Efficient Paradigm (FDEP), which can seamlessly adapt to existing encoder-decoder-based methods and significantly improve accuracy without additional inference overhead. Specifically, a Semantic Alignment Modulation Fusion (SAMF) module is designed to achieve dynamic alignment and deep fusion of the global semantic priors from VFMs with task-specific features. Meanwhile, to avoid the inference time burden introduced by VFMs, we propose a Collaborative Optimization-based Implicit Self-Distillation (CO-ISD) strategy, which enables implicit semantic transfer between the main and lightweight branches through parameter sharing and synchronized backpropagation. In addition, to unify the fragmented evaluation system, we construct a Holistic SIRST Evaluation (HSE) metric that performs multi-threshold integral evaluation at both pixel-level confidence and target-level robustness, providing a stable and comprehensive basis for fair model comparison. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the SIRST detection networks equipped with our FDEP framework achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on multiple public datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/YuChuang1205/FDEP-Framework
title Rethinking Infrared Small Target Detection: A Foundation-Driven Efficient Paradigm
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.05511