Multi-Stage Multi-Scale Local Feature Fusion for Infrared Small Target Detection

The detection of small infrared targets with dense distributions and large-scale variations is an extremely challenging problem. This paper proposes a multi-stage, multi-scale local feature fusion method for infrared small target detection to address this problem. The method is based on multi-stage and multi-scale local feature fusion. Firstly, considering the significant variation in target sizes, ResNet-18 is utilized to extract image features at different stages. Then, for each stage, multi-scale feature pyramids are employed to obtain corresponding multi-scale local features. Secondly, to enhance the detection rate of densely distributed targets, the multi-stage and multi-scale features are progressively fused and concatenated to form the final fusion results. Finally, the fusion results are fed into the target detector for detection. The experimental results for the SIRST and MDFA demonstrate that the proposed method effectively improves the performance of infrared small target detection. The proposed method achieved mIoU values of 63.43% and 46.29% on two datasets, along with F-measure values of 77.62% and 63.28%, respectively.