Infrared Small Target Detection Algorithm Based on Real-Time Semantic Segmentation

Semantic segmentation network classifies images at the pixel level, which has more advantages for accurate target location than target identification, thus playing an essential role in infrared small target detection. According to the characteristics of an infrared small target, a novel infrared small target detection network based on real-time semantic segmentation is proposed. A good compromise between the speed and impact of infrared tiny target segmentation is achieved by the network, based on the dual branch feature extraction structure, using the progressive feature fusion module and enhanced Dice loss function. The experimental results demonstrate that the algorithm achieves high accuracy compared with five algorithms, namely FCN, ICNet, BiSeNet V2, STDCNet, and TopFormer for small parameters and calculation. The proposed algorithem is advantageous for the practical application of semantic segmentation in infrared small target detection because its reasoning frame rate on the actual collected infrared small target dataset is 44% higher than that of traditional FCN, reaching 117 frame/s, and the intersection and merging of infrared small targets are 49% higher than that of TopFormer with the similar reasoning frame rate.