SIRST-5K: Exploring Massive Negatives Synthesis with Self-supervised Learning for Robust Infrared Small Target Detection

TL;DR

This paper introduces a negative sample augmentation method using self-supervised learning to generate a large synthetic dataset for infrared small target detection, significantly improving model performance and training efficiency.

Contribution

It proposes a novel negative augmentation strategy with realistic noise modeling to create a large, diverse synthetic dataset for enhanced infrared small target detection.

Findings

Improved detection accuracy over state-of-the-art methods

Faster convergence in training models

Enhanced dataset diversity and realism

Abstract

Single-frame infrared small target (SIRST) detection aims to recognize small targets from clutter backgrounds. Recently, convolutional neural networks have achieved significant advantages in general object detection. With the development of Transformer, the scale of SIRST models is constantly increasing. Due to the limited training samples, performance has not been improved accordingly. The quality, quantity, and diversity of the infrared dataset are critical to the detection of small targets. To highlight this issue, we propose a negative sample augmentation method in this paper. Specifically, a negative augmentation approach is proposed to generate massive negatives for self-supervised learning. Firstly, we perform a sequential noise modeling technology to generate realistic infrared data. Secondly, we fuse the extracted noise with the original data to facilitate diversity and fidelity in the generated data. Lastly, we proposed a negative augmentation strategy to enrich diversity as well as maintain semantic invariance. The proposed algorithm produces a synthetic SIRST-5K dataset, which contains massive pseudo-data and corresponding labels. With a rich diversity of infrared small target data, our algorithm significantly improves the model performance and convergence speed. Compared with other state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, our method achieves outstanding performance in terms of probability of detection (Pd), false-alarm rate (Fa), and intersection over union (IoU).