Global information aware network with global interaction graph attention for infrared small target detection

Abstract Detecting small targets in infrared images is crucial for ground surveillance and air traffic control. However, distinguishing small infrared targets from similar backgrounds is challenging due to their lack of structural and textural characteristics. To address these challenges, this study proposes a novel global information‐aware network with global interaction graph attention (GIGA) for infrared small target detection. The GIGA consists of a global interaction layer (GILayer), graph attention weights (GAW), and a global relational learning (GRL) module. Specifically, the GILayer dynamically learns global inter‐pixel relationships of small target images by enhancing the dependencies between feature dimensions. The GAW component calculates pixel‐by‐pixel similarity across the entire feature map using graph attention mechanisms, while the GRL module retains critical similarity features in the feature extraction network, thereby facilitating small target detection. Additionally, the multi‐scale context fusion module utilises self‐attention and dilation convolution to complement richer feature details at different scales. Experimental results on both natural and synthetic datasets demonstrate the proposed method's superiority over other state‐of‐the‐art conventional and deep learning approaches in infrared small target detection.