Forgetting the Background: A Masking Approach for Enhanced Infrared Small-Target Detection

Infrared small-target detection (ISTD) in a single frame is an essential, yet challenging task due to its small size of targets, weak energy, and clutter background. Current methods either design complex network architectures to facilitate multilevel information interaction (e.g., DNA-Net and UIU-Net) or introduce structural texture priors to enhance feature discrimination (e.g., SRNet and CSRNet). However, both methods fail to explicitly distinguish or suppress the interference of complex background from infrared small targets, which makes them easy to “get lost” in clutter background with insufficient attention to the targets. In this work, we innovatively propose a novel background-masking approach (denoted as BGM) for ISTD. The proposed BGM aims to force the network to focus exclusively on the target by masking out irrelevant background information, thereby enhancing the network’s ability to detect weak and small infrared targets. Specifically, we present a new ISTD method that leverages a proxy training task with masking, enabling the network to simultaneously predict on both the original input and the masked data, where the background is randomly masked/forgotten. This strategy allows for a better concentration of the model on the shapeless targets rather than the cluttered background. The method is flexible with a simple U-shaped network without complicated manipulation and also computationally efficient without increasing the overall computational burden during inference. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed BGM effectively enhances the detection performance of infrared small targets and achieves 70.8% mean intersection over union (mIoU) on IRSTD-1K. The source code would be available at <uri xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://github.com/ZhihaoMa123/BGM</uri>