# IRSAM: Advancing Segment Anything Model for Infrared Small Target Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.07520 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07520/

## Key facts

- Cited by 46 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [AdaptFormer: Adapting Vision Transformers for Scalable Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13535/) (2022)
- [Segment Anything in High Quality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01567/) (2023)
- [Faster Segment Anything: Towards Lightweight SAM for Mobile Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14289/) (2023)
- [Fast Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.12156/) (2023)
- [Customized Segment Anything Model for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13785/) (2023)
- [Asymmetric Contextual Modulation for Infrared Small Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.14530/) (2020)
- [Dense Nested Attention Network for Infrared Small Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00487/) (2021)
- [UIU-Net: U-Net in U-Net for Infrared Small Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00968/) (2022)
- [Empowering Things with Intelligence: A Survey of the Progress, Challenges, and Opportunities in Artificial Intelligence of Things](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.08612/) (2020)
- [Attentional Local Contrast Networks for Infrared Small Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.08573/) (2020)
- [What do Vision Transformers Learn? A Visual Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06727/) (2022)
- [Visual Prompt Tuning for Generative Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.00990/) (2022)
- [Reweighted Infrared Patch-Tensor Model With Both Non-Local and Local Priors for Single-Frame Small Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.09157/) (2017)
- [Mapping Degeneration Meets Label Evolution: Learning Infrared Small Target Detection with Single Point Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01484/) (2023)
- [A Data-Based Perspective on Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05739/) (2022)
- [ESSAformer: Efficient Transformer for Hyperspectral Image Super-resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14010/) (2023)
- [Monte Carlo Linear Clustering with Single-Point Supervision is Enough for Infrared Small Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04442/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [DATransNet: Dynamic Attention Transformer Network for Infrared Small Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.19599/) (2024)
- [IRGPT: Understanding Real-world Infrared Image with Bi-cross-modal Curriculum on Large-scale Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.14449/) (2025)
- [RPCANet++: Deep Interpretable Robust PCA for Sparse Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.04190/) (2025)
- [EarthGPT-X: A Spatial MLLM for Multi-level Multi-Source Remote Sensing Imagery Understanding with Visual Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12795/) (2025)
- [DRPCA-Net: Make Robust PCA Great Again for Infrared Small Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.09541/) (2025)
- [Beyond Full Labels: Energy-Double-Guided Single-Point Prompt for Infrared Small Target Label Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.08191/) (2024)
- [Seeing Through the Noise: Improving Infrared Small Target Detection and Segmentation from Noise Suppression Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06878/) (2025)
- [Refining Context-Entangled Content Segmentation via Curriculum Selection and Anti-Curriculum Promotion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.01183/) (2026)
- [Deep Depth Estimation from Thermal Image: Dataset, Benchmark, and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22060/) (2025)
- [Lightweight Deep Unfolding Networks with Enhanced Robustness for Infrared Small Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.08205/) (2025)
- [YOLO-MST: Multiscale deep learning method for infrared small target detection based on super-resolution and YOLO](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.19878/) (2024)
- [SeqCSIST: Sequential Closely-Spaced Infrared Small Target Unmixing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.09556/) (2025)
- [High-Frequency Enhanced Hybrid Neural Representation for Video Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.06685/) (2024)
- [AuxDet: Auxiliary Metadata Matters for Omni-Domain Infrared Small Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15184/) (2025)
- [RRCANet: Recurrent Reusable-Convolution Attention Network for Infrared Small Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02393/) (2025)
- [10K is Enough: An Ultra-Lightweight Binarized Network for Infrared Small-Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02662/) (2025)
- [ViRefSAM: Visual Reference-Guided Segment Anything Model for Remote Sensing Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02294/) (2025)
- [Weakly-supervised Contrastive Learning with Quantity Prompts for Moving Infrared Small Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02454/) (2025)
- [Promptable Foundation Models for SAR Remote Sensing: Adapting the Segment Anything Model for Snow Avalanche Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.01213/) (2026)
- [Point-to-Mask: From Arbitrary Point Annotations to Mask-Level Infrared Small Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.16257/) (2026)
- [Knowledge-Guided Adversarial Training for Infrared Object Detection via Thermal Radiation Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.25170/) (2026)
- [FSGNet: A Frequency-Aware and Semantic Guidance Network for Infrared Small Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.25389/) (2026)
- [Na-IRSTD: Enhancing Infrared Small Target Detection via Native-Resolution Feature Selection and Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.05804/) (2026)
- [Learning Dynamic Local Context Representations for Infrared Small Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.17401/) (2024)
- [FullTransNet: Full Transformer with Local-Global Attention for Video Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.00882/) (2025)
- [LSP-ST: Ladder Shape-Biased Side-Tuning for Robust Infrared Small Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14481/) (2025)
- [Adapting Segment Anything Model for Power Transmission Corridor Hazard Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22105/) (2025)
- [O2Former:Direction-Aware and Multi-Scale Query Enhancement for SAR Ship Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.11913/) (2025)
- [SWAN: Synergistic Wavelet-Attention Network for Infrared Small Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01322/) (2025)
- [HyperTea: A Hypergraph-based Temporal Enhancement and Alignment Network for Moving Infrared Small Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10678/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The recent Segment Anything Model (SAM) is a significant advancement in natural image segmentation, exhibiting potent zero-shot performance suitable for various downstream image segmentation tasks. However, directly utilizing the pretrained SAM for Infrared Small Target Detection (IRSTD) task falls short in achieving satisfying performance due to a notable domain gap between natural and infrared images. Unlike a visible light camera, a thermal imager reveals an object's temperature distribution by capturing infrared radiation. Small targets often show a subtle temperature transition at the object's boundaries. To address this issue, we propose the IRSAM model for IRSTD, which improves SAM's encoder-decoder architecture to learn better feature representation of infrared small objects. Specifically, we design a Perona-Malik diffusion (PMD)-based block and incorporate it into multiple levels of SAM's encoder to help it capture essential structural features while suppressing noise. Additionally, we devise a Granularity-Aware Decoder (GAD) to fuse the multi-granularity feature from the encoder to capture structural information that may be lost in long-distance modeling. Extensive experiments on the public datasets, including NUAA-SIRST, NUDT-SIRST, and IRSTD-1K, validate the design choice of IRSAM and its significant superiority over representative state-of-the-art methods. The source code are available at: github.com/IPIC-Lab/IRSAM.