AuxDet: Auxiliary Metadata Matters for Omni-Domain Infrared Small Target Detection

TL;DR

AuxDet introduces a novel multimodal infrared small target detection framework that leverages auxiliary metadata to enhance robustness and accuracy across diverse imaging conditions and environments.

Contribution

This work is the first to incorporate auxiliary metadata into IRSTD, enabling scene-aware optimization and adaptive feature learning for omni-domain infrared small target detection.

Findings

AuxDet outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the WideIRSTD-Full benchmark.

Metadata integration improves robustness against domain shifts and appearance variations.

The proposed fusion and enhancement modules effectively refine target features.

Abstract

Omni-domain infrared small target detection (Omni-IRSTD) poses formidable challenges, as a single model must seamlessly adapt to diverse imaging systems, varying resolutions, and multiple spectral bands simultaneously. Current approaches predominantly rely on visual-only modeling paradigms that not only struggle with complex background interference and inherently scarce target features, but also exhibit limited generalization capabilities across complex omni-scene environments where significant domain shifts and appearance variations occur. In this work, we reveal a critical oversight in existing paradigms: the neglect of readily available auxiliary metadata describing imaging parameters and acquisition conditions, such as spectral bands, sensor platforms, resolution, and observation perspectives. To address this limitation, we propose the Auxiliary Metadata Driven Infrared Small Target Detector (AuxDet), a novel multimodal framework that is the first to incorporate metadata into the IRSTD paradigm for scene-aware optimization. Through a high-dimensional fusion module based on multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs), AuxDet dynamically integrates metadata semantics with visual features, guiding adaptive representation learning for each individual sample. Additionally, we design a lightweight prior-initialized enhancement module using 1D convolutional blocks to further refine fused features and recover fine-grained target cues. Extensive experiments on the challenging WideIRSTD-Full benchmark demonstrate that AuxDet consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, validating the critical role of auxiliary information in improving robustness and accuracy in omni-domain IRSTD tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/GrokCV/AuxDet.