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| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2026
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| Online Access: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05446 |
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| _version_ | 1866908754676547584 |
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| author | Xie, Hongyang He, Hongyang Sanchez, Victor |
| author_facet | Xie, Hongyang He, Hongyang Sanchez, Victor |
| contents | Infrared small target detection (ISTD) remains a long-standing challenge due to weak signal contrast, limited spatial extent, and cluttered backgrounds. Despite performance improvements from convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and Vision Transformers (ViTs), current models lack a mechanism to trace how small targets trigger directional, layer-wise perturbations in the feature space, which is an essential cue for distinguishing signal from structured noise in infrared scenes. To address this limitation, we propose the Trajectory-Aware Mamba Propagation Network (TAPM-Net), which explicitly models the spatial diffusion behavior of target-induced feature disturbances. TAPM-Net is built upon two novel components: a Perturbation-guided Path Module (PGM) and a Trajectory-Aware State Block (TASB). The PGM constructs perturbation energy fields from multi-level features and extracts gradient-following feature trajectories that reflect the directionality of local responses. The resulting feature trajectories are fed into the TASB, a Mamba-based state-space unit that models dynamic propagation along each trajectory while incorporating velocity-constrained diffusion and semantically aligned feature fusion from word-level and sentence-level embeddings. Unlike existing attention-based methods, TAPM-Net enables anisotropic, context-sensitive state transitions along spatial trajectories while maintaining global coherence at low computational cost. Experiments on NUAA-SIRST and IRSTD-1K demonstrate that TAPM-Net achieves state-of-the-art performance in ISTD. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_05446 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | TAPM-Net: Trajectory-Aware Perturbation Modeling for Infrared Small Target Detection Xie, Hongyang He, Hongyang Sanchez, Victor Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Infrared small target detection (ISTD) remains a long-standing challenge due to weak signal contrast, limited spatial extent, and cluttered backgrounds. Despite performance improvements from convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and Vision Transformers (ViTs), current models lack a mechanism to trace how small targets trigger directional, layer-wise perturbations in the feature space, which is an essential cue for distinguishing signal from structured noise in infrared scenes. To address this limitation, we propose the Trajectory-Aware Mamba Propagation Network (TAPM-Net), which explicitly models the spatial diffusion behavior of target-induced feature disturbances. TAPM-Net is built upon two novel components: a Perturbation-guided Path Module (PGM) and a Trajectory-Aware State Block (TASB). The PGM constructs perturbation energy fields from multi-level features and extracts gradient-following feature trajectories that reflect the directionality of local responses. The resulting feature trajectories are fed into the TASB, a Mamba-based state-space unit that models dynamic propagation along each trajectory while incorporating velocity-constrained diffusion and semantically aligned feature fusion from word-level and sentence-level embeddings. Unlike existing attention-based methods, TAPM-Net enables anisotropic, context-sensitive state transitions along spatial trajectories while maintaining global coherence at low computational cost. Experiments on NUAA-SIRST and IRSTD-1K demonstrate that TAPM-Net achieves state-of-the-art performance in ISTD. |
| title | TAPM-Net: Trajectory-Aware Perturbation Modeling for Infrared Small Target Detection |
| topic | Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05446 |