Rethinking Generalizable Infrared Small Target Detection: A Real-Scene Benchmark and Cross-View Representation Learning

Infrared small target detection (ISTD) is highly sensitive to sensor type, observation conditions, and the intrinsic properties of the target. These factors can introduce substantial variations in the distribution of acquired infrared image data, a phenomenon known as domain shift. Such distribution discrepancies significantly hinder the generalization capability of ISTD models across diverse scenarios. To tackle this challenge, this paper introduces an ISTD framework enhanced by domain adaptation. To alleviate distribution shift between datasets and achieve cross-sample alignment, we introduce Cross-view Channel Alignment (CCA). Additionally, we propose the Cross-view Top-K Fusion strategy, which integrates target information with diverse background features, enhancing the model’s ability to extract critical data characteristics. To further mitigate the impact of noise on ISTD, we develop a Noise-guided Representation learning strategy. This approach enables the model to learn more noise-resistant feature representations, to improve its generalization capability across diverse noisy domains. Finally, we develope a dedicated infrared small target dataset, RealScene-ISTD. Compared to state-of-the-art methods, our approach demonstrates superior performance in terms of detection probability (<italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">P_d</i>), false alarm rate (<italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">F_a</i>), and intersection over union (<italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">IoU</i>). The code is available at: https://github.com/luy0222/RealScene-ISTD.