MSLCP-DETR: A Multi-Scale Linear Attention and Sparse Fusion Framework for Infrared Small Target Detection in Vehicle-Mounted Systems

Detecting small infrared targets in vehicle-mounted systems remains challenging due to weak thermal radiation, cross-scale feature loss, and dynamic background interference. To address these issues, this paper proposes MSLCP-DETR, an enhanced RT-DETR-based framework that integrates multi-scale linear attention and sparse fusion mechanisms. The model introduces three novel components: a Multi-Scale Linear Attention Encoder (MSLA-AIFI), which combines multi-branch depth-wise convolution with linear attention to efficiently capture cross-scale features while reducing computational complexity; a Cross-Scale Small Object Feature Optimization module (CSOFO), which enhances the localization of small targets in dense scenes through spatial rearrangement and dynamic modeling; and a Pyramid Sparse Transformer (PST), which replaces traditional dense fusion with a dual-branch sparse attention mechanism to improve both accuracy and real-time performance. Extensive experiments on the M3FD and FLIR datasets demonstrate that MSLCP-DETR achieves an excellent balance between accuracy and efficiency, with its precision, mAP@50, and mAP@50:95 reaching 90.3%, 79.5%, and 86.0%, respectively. Ablation studies and visual analysis further validate the effectiveness of the proposed modules and the overall design strategy.