Point-to-Mask: From Arbitrary Point Annotations to Mask-Level Infrared Small Target Detection

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Gao, Weihua, Niu, Wenlong, Tang, Jie, Yang, Man, Zhang, Jiafeng, Peng, Xiaodong
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Gao, Weihua
Niu, Wenlong
Tang, Jie
Yang, Man
Zhang, Jiafeng
Peng, Xiaodong
author_facet Gao, Weihua
Niu, Wenlong
Tang, Jie
Yang, Man
Zhang, Jiafeng
Peng, Xiaodong
contents Infrared small target detection (IRSTD) methods predominantly formulate the task as pixel-level segmentation, which requires costly dense annotations and is not well suited to tiny targets with weak texture and ambiguous boundaries. To address this issue, we propose Point-to-Mask, a framework that bridges low-cost point supervision and mask-level detection through two components: a Physics-driven Adaptive Mask Generation (PAMG) module that converts point annotations into compact target masks and geometric cues, and a lightweight Radius-aware Point Regression Network (RPR-Net) that reformulates IRSTD as target center localization and effective radius regression using spatiotemporal motion cues. The two modules form a closed loop: PAMG generates pseudo masks and geometric supervision during training, while the geometric predictions of RPR-Net are fed back to PAMG for pixel-level mask recovery during inference. To facilitate systematic evaluation, we further construct SIRSTD-Pixel, a sequential dataset with refined pixel-level annotations. Experiments show that the proposed framework achieves strong pseudo-label quality, high detection accuracy, and efficient inference, approaching full-supervision performance under point-supervised settings with substantially lower annotation cost. Code and datasets will be available at: https://github.com/GaoScience/point-to-mask.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_16257
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Point-to-Mask: From Arbitrary Point Annotations to Mask-Level Infrared Small Target Detection
Gao, Weihua
Niu, Wenlong
Tang, Jie
Yang, Man
Zhang, Jiafeng
Peng, Xiaodong
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Infrared small target detection (IRSTD) methods predominantly formulate the task as pixel-level segmentation, which requires costly dense annotations and is not well suited to tiny targets with weak texture and ambiguous boundaries. To address this issue, we propose Point-to-Mask, a framework that bridges low-cost point supervision and mask-level detection through two components: a Physics-driven Adaptive Mask Generation (PAMG) module that converts point annotations into compact target masks and geometric cues, and a lightweight Radius-aware Point Regression Network (RPR-Net) that reformulates IRSTD as target center localization and effective radius regression using spatiotemporal motion cues. The two modules form a closed loop: PAMG generates pseudo masks and geometric supervision during training, while the geometric predictions of RPR-Net are fed back to PAMG for pixel-level mask recovery during inference. To facilitate systematic evaluation, we further construct SIRSTD-Pixel, a sequential dataset with refined pixel-level annotations. Experiments show that the proposed framework achieves strong pseudo-label quality, high detection accuracy, and efficient inference, approaching full-supervision performance under point-supervised settings with substantially lower annotation cost. Code and datasets will be available at: https://github.com/GaoScience/point-to-mask.
title Point-to-Mask: From Arbitrary Point Annotations to Mask-Level Infrared Small Target Detection
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.16257