Sparse Prior Is Not All You Need: When Differential Directionality Meets Saliency Coherence for Infrared Small Target Detection

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel infrared small target detection method combining differential directionality priors and saliency coherence, outperforming existing methods in complex backgrounds.

Contribution

It proposes a new SDD framework that leverages directional features and saliency strategies, enhancing target detection beyond traditional sparsity-based methods.

Findings

Outperforms ten state-of-the-art methods in detection accuracy

Effectively suppresses clutter and enhances target contrast

Validated on multiple real-world datasets

Abstract

Infrared small target detection is crucial for the efficacy of infrared search and tracking systems. Current tensor decomposition methods emphasize representing small targets with sparsity but struggle to separate targets from complex backgrounds due to insufficient use of intrinsic directional information and reduced target visibility during decomposition. To address these challenges, this study introduces a Sparse Differential Directionality prior (SDD) framework. SDD leverages the distinct directional characteristics of targets to differentiate them from the background, applying mixed sparse constraints on the differential directional images and continuity difference matrix of the temporal component, both derived from Tucker decomposition. We further enhance target detectability with a saliency coherence strategy that intensifies target contrast against the background during hierarchical decomposition. A Proximal Alternating Minimization-based (PAM) algorithm efficiently solves our proposed model. Experimental results on several real-world datasets validate our method's effectiveness, outperforming ten state-of-the-art methods in target detection and clutter suppression. Our code is available at https://github.com/GrokCV/SDD.