aiqbench analysis
This research addresses critical failure modes in DETR-based detectors for infrared small target detection by refining query initialization through spectral screening and frequency analysis. By mitigating the dominance of background noise over sparse targets, SEF-DETR offers a more robust solution for low signal-to-noise ratio environments without increasing computational overhead.
Breaking Self-Attention Failure: Rethinking Query Initialization for Infrared Small Target Detection
arXiv:2601.02837v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Infrared small target detection (IRSTD) faces significant challenges due to low signal-to-noise ratios, extremely small target sizes, and complex cluttered backgrounds. Although DETR-based detectors benefit from global context modeling, their query initialization can become unreliable in IRSTD because only a few encoder tokens correspond to targets, while the majority describe the background. We revisit this phenomenon and reveal that the target-relevant embeddings of IRST are inevitably overwhelmed by dominant background features due to the self-attention mechanism, leading to unreliable query initialization and inaccurate target localization. To address this issue, we propose SEF-DETR, a novel framework that refines query initialization through Patch-wise Spectral Screening (PSS), Frequency-Routed Examination (FRE), and Reliability-Consistency-aware Fusion (RCF). PSS encodes the radial and directional energy distributions of local Fourier spectra and aggregates overlapping patch predictions into a target-relevant density map. Guided by this map, FRE performs sparse deformable re-examination after each encoder layer, while retaining content-driven sampling to distinguish true targets from frequency-domain false alarms. RCF further re-ranks candidate queries according to spatial-frequency consistency and frequency reliability. Extensive experiments on three public IRSTD datasets demonstrate that SEF-DETR achieves superior detection performance over state-of-the-art methods with low computational overhead, providing a robust and efficient DETR-based solution for IRSTD.
Abstract:Infrared small target detection (IRSTD) faces significant challenges due to low signal-to-noise ratios, extremely small target sizes, and complex cluttered backgrounds. Although DETR-based detectors benefit from global context modeling, their query initialization can become unreliable in IRSTD because only a few encoder tokens correspond to targets, while the majority describe the background. We revisit this phenomenon and reveal that the target-relevant embeddings of IRST are inevitably overwhelmed by dominant background features due to the self-attention mechanism, leading to unreliable query initialization and inaccurate target localization. To address this issue, we propose SEF-DETR, a novel framework that refines query initialization through Patch-wise Spectral Screening (PSS), Frequency-Routed Examination (FRE), and Reliability-Consistency-aware Fusion (RCF). PSS encodes the radial and directional energy distributions of local Fourier spectra and aggregates overlapping patch predictions into a target-relevant density map. Guided by this map, FRE performs sparse deformable re-examination after each encoder layer, while retaining content-driven sampling to distinguish true targets from frequency-domain false alarms. RCF further re-ranks candidate queries according to spatial-frequency consistency and frequency reliability. Extensive experiments on three public IRSTD datasets demonstrate that SEF-DETR achieves superior detection performance over state-of-the-art methods with low computational overhead, providing a robust and efficient DETR-based solution for IRSTD.
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)
arXiv:2601.02837 [cs.CV]
(or arXiv:2601.02837v2 [cs.CV] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2601.02837 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite
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Full text under the publisher's open licence · 298 words
