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Acta Aeronautica et Astronautica Sinica ›› 2024, Vol. 45 ›› Issue (14): 628959-628959.

• special column • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Infrared small object detection based on attention mechanism

Junyu LI1, Qiankun LIU1, Ying FU1,2()   

  1. 1.MIIT Key Laboratory of Complex-field Intelligent Sensing,Beijing Institute of Technology,Beijing 100081,China
    2.Yangtze Delta Region Academy of Beijing Institute of Technology,Jiaxing 314019,China
  • Received:2023-05-03 Revised:2023-05-30 Accepted:2023-07-03 Online:2024-07-25 Published:2024-06-17
  • Contact: Ying FU E-mail:fuying@bit.edu.cn
  • Supported by:
    National Natural Science Foundation of China(62171038);The R&D Program of Beijing Municipal Education Commission(KZ202211417048)

Abstract:

As the detection accuracy of salient objects in the image has been improved, the focus of research has gradually shifted to how to improve the accuracy of small object detection. However, existing object detection methods mainly study the general object detection using visible images as the input, and most small object detection methods are designed for visible images, leaving the small object detection in infrared images underexplored. Compared with standard scale objects, infrared small objects lack color information, which makes them more dependent on contextual information. In this paper, an infrared small object detection model is proposed based on the standard YOLOv5 model. The local information around small objects is effectively combined with global information by a Dynamic Contextual Information Extraction Module, which adapts to the subtle morphological changes of infrared small objects dynamically. A Channel-Detail Attention Module is designed to aggregate the channel and detail information of the infrared small objects to improve the accuracy of the regression. Considering the problem of loss of detailed features in the process of network convolution, features with new scales are upsampled and fused with shallow features to capture more detailed information of infrared small objects and avoid feature blending. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, experiments are conducted on the public infrared datasets, including ITTD, IRSTD-1k, and NUAA-SIRST. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the compared methods in terms of mAP by 5.1% on the ITTD dataset, and the mAP is also improved by 3.7% compared to that of the baseline method (i.e., YOLOv5). Results on the IRSTD-1k and NUAA-SIRST datasets also demonstrate the effectiveness of our design. An ablation study is performed to verify the effectiveness of different modules. The proposed infrared small object detection model is robust to the infrared small objects in complex backgrounds, which improves the accuracy and reduces the false alarm rate of infrared small object detection effectively.

Key words: deep learning, object detection, infrared small object detection, attention mechanism, YOLOv5

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