Beyond Full Labels: Energy-Double-Guided Single-Point Prompt for Infrared Small Target Label Generation

TL;DR

This paper introduces EDGSP, a novel energy-double-guided single-point prompt framework that significantly improves infrared small target label generation, reducing annotation effort while achieving high detection accuracy and surpassing manual labels.

Contribution

The paper proposes a new single-point prompt method for infrared small target label generation that outperforms existing clustering-based approaches and enhances detection performance.

Findings

Achieves 100% object detection probability and 0% false alarms on multiple datasets.

Improves IoU by 13.28% over state-of-the-art label generation methods.

Enables pseudo labels from coarse annotations to surpass manual labels in detection tasks.

Abstract

We pioneer a learning-based single-point prompt paradigm for infrared small target label generation (IRSTLG) to lobber annotation burdens. Unlike previous clustering-based methods, our intuition is that point-guided mask generation just requires one more prompt than target detection, i.e., IRSTLG can be treated as an infrared small target detection (IRSTD) with the location hint. Therefore, we propose an elegant yet effective Energy-Double-Guided Single-point Prompt (EDGSP) framework, aiming to adeptly transform a coarse IRSTD network into a refined label generation method. Specifically, EDGSP comprises three key modules: 1) target energy initialization (TEI), which establishes a foundational outline to streamline the mapping process for effective shape evolution, 2) double prompt embedding (DPE) for rapidly localizing interesting regions and reinforcing high-resolution individual edges to avoid label adhesion, and 3) bounding box-based matching (BBM) for eliminating false masks via considering comprehensive cluster boundary conditions to obtain a reliable output. In this way, pseudo labels generated by three backbones equipped with our EDGSP achieve 100% object-level probability of detection (Pd) and 0% false-alarm rate (Fa) on SIRST, NUDT-SIRST, and IRSTD-1k datasets, with a pixel-level intersection over union (IoU) improvement of 13.28% over state-of-the-art (SOTA) label generation methods. Further applying our inferred masks to train detection models, EDGSP, for the first time, enables a single-point-generated pseudo mask to surpass the manual labels. Even with coarse single-point annotations, it still achieves 99.5% performance of full labeling. Code is available at https://github.com/xdFai/EDGSP.