Triple-Directional Fusion Attention for Infrared Small Target Detection

Attention mechanism has gained popularity due to its effectiveness. However, most existing mechanisms are designed for large-sized targets currently, with limited improvement in single-frame infrared small target (SIRST) detection tasks. In this letter, we propose a novel attention mechanism to enhance the extraction capacity of deep networks for infrared small targets, termed the triple-directional fusion attention module (TFAM). This module aggregates channel-, height-, and width-dimension into three independent directional perception attention vectors, preserving both accurate channel and spatial information. Through adaptive cross-direction interaction, TFAM establishes inter-directional dependencies essential for enhancing faint target signatures in deep layers. Notably, TFAM only requires minimal complexity for modeling and offers flexibility in integration. Experiments conducted on the NUDT-SIRST and NUAA-SIRST datasets demonstrate consistent improvements.