Infrared dim and small target detection based on U-Transformer

Infrared dim and small target detection is a key technology for space-based infrared search and tracking systems. Traditional detection methods have a high false alarm rate and fail to handle complex background and high-noise scenarios. Also, the methods cannot effectively detect targets on a small scale. In this paper, a U-Transformer method is proposed, and a transformer is introduced into the infrared dim and small target detection. First, a U-shaped network is constructed. In the encoder part, the self-attention mechanism is used for infrared dim and small target feature extraction, which helps to solve the problems of losing dim and small target features of deep networks. Meanwhile, by using the encoding and decoding structure, infrared dim and small target features are filtered from the complex background while the shallow features and semantic information of the target are retained. Experiments show that anchor-free and transformer have great potential for infrared dim and small target detection. On the datasets with a complex background, our method outperforms the state-of-the-art detectors and meets the real-time requirement. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/Linaom1214/U-Transformer.