MDF-Det: Motion-Aware Decoupling and Scene Filtering for Wide Area Small Moving Target Detection

Object detection in Wide Area Motion Imagery (WAMI) is crucial for large-scale intelligent surveillance and monitoring systems. However, detecting extremely small moving targets in low-frame-rate grayscale WAMI remains highly challenging. In particular, three key problems limit the performance of existing methods: weak motion responses caused by low target contrast can lead to missed detections; densely distributed targets often produce merged responses that are difficult to separate; and registration artifacts, parallax, and dynamic background clutter can generate numerous false alarms. To address these problems, we propose MDF-Det, a coarse-to-fine spatiotemporal framework for WAMI small moving target detection. The framework consists of three complementary components. First, a Motion and Appearance Feature Fusion (MAFF) strategy integrates dense optical-flow-derived motion saliency with grayscale frame differencing to enhance weak target responses and improve candidate preservation. Second, a Spatial Attention-Guided Target Decoupling (SA-TD) module employs fine-grained heatmap decoding and step-threshold degradation to separate merged responses in densely populated scenes. Finally, a Scene-Prior Guided Filtering (SPGF) mechanism learns complementary vehicle-accessibility and motion-activity priors from scene context to suppress contextually implausible false alarms caused by complex background interference. Extensive experiments on six evaluation AOIs of the WPAFB 2009 dataset demonstrate that MDF-Det achieves an average F1 score of 0.878, corresponding to a relative improvement of 5.5% over the strongest baseline.