Yinchao Han | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

PICANet: Physics-Informed Cascaded Asymmetric Network for Infrared Small Target Detection

Infrared small target detection (ISTD) is an important research direction in image processing. However, existing methods are limited by severe background noise propagation and target degradation in high-level semantic features. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a plug-and-play physics-informed cascaded asymmetric network, named PICANet. Specifically, we construct a hierarchical prior decoupling module to explicitly extract low-level and high-level physical information, thereby characterizing target features at different levels rather than relying solely on convolutional extraction. Furthermore, a dual-prior interactive fusion module is developed to dynamically refine target representations while suppressing complex background clutter. Unlike previous work, a multi-level cross-feature attention module with the cascaded asymmetric mechanism is introduced to achieve precise alignment between high-level semantics and low-level spatial details. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed PICANet outperforms state-of-the-art ISTD methods, showing satisfactory detection accuracy even against complex backgrounds. Our code is available at https://github.com/xianchaoxiu/PICANet.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Lightweight Deep Unfolding Networks with Enhanced Robustness for Infrared Small Target Detection

Infrared small target detection (ISTD) is one of the key techniques in image processing. Although deep unfolding networks (DUNs) have demonstrated promising performance in ISTD due to their model interpretability and data adaptability, existing methods still face significant challenges in parameter lightweightness and noise robustness. In this regard, we propose a highly lightweight framework based on robust principal component analysis (RPCA) called L-RPCANet. Technically, a hierarchical bottleneck structure is constructed to reduce and increase the channel dimension in the single-channel input infrared image to achieve channel-wise feature refinement, with bottleneck layers designed in each module to extract features. This reduces the number of channels in feature extraction and improves the lightweightness of network parameters. Furthermore, a noise reduction module is embedded to enhance the robustness against complex noise. In addition, squeeze-and-excitation networks (SENets) are leveraged as a channel attention mechanism to focus on the varying importance of different features across channels, thereby achieving excellent performance while maintaining both lightweightness and robustness. Extensive experiments on the ISTD datasets validate the superiority of our proposed method compared with state-of-the-art methods covering RPCANet, DRPCANet, and RPCANet++. The code will be available at https://github.com/xianchaoxiu/L-RPCANet.

cs.CV↗