An Infrared Maritime Small Target Detection Algorithm Based on Semantic, Detail, and Edge Multidimensional Information Fusion

Abstract

The infrared small target detection technology has a wide range of applications in maritime defense warning and maritime border reconnaissance, especially in the maritime and sky scenes for detecting potential terrorist attacks and monitoring maritime borders. However, due to the weak nature of infrared targets and the presence of background interferences such as wave reflections and islands in maritime scenes, targets are easily submerged in the background, making small infrared targets hard to detect. We propose the multidimensional information fusion network(MIFNet) that can learn more information from limited data and achieve more accurate target segmentation. The multidimensional information fusion module calculates semantic information through the attention mechanism and fuses it with detailed information and edge information, enabling the network to achieve more accurate target position detection and avoid detecting one target as multiple ones, especially in high-precision scenes such as maritime target detection, thus effectively improving the accuracy and reliability of detection. Moreover, experiments on our constructed dataset for small infrared targets in maritime scenes demonstrate that our algorithm has advantages over other state-of-the-art algorithms, with an IoU of 79.09%, nIoU of 79.43%, F1 score of 87.88%, and AuC of 95.96%.

Keywords

• infrared maritime images
• small infrared target detection
• feature fusion
• gradient information
• attention mechanism