# Background Semantics Matter: Cross-Task Feature Exchange Network for Clustered Infrared Small Target Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.20078 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.20078/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 56 of its 90 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 56)

- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [CutMix: Regularization Strategy to Train Strong Classifiers with Localizable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04899/) (2019)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12122/) (2021)
- [Improved Regularization of Convolutional Neural Networks with Cutout](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04552/) (2017)
- [FCOS: Fully Convolutional One-Stage Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01355/) (2019)
- [Objects as Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07850/) (2019)
- [YOLOX: Exceeding YOLO Series in 2021](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08430/) (2021)
- [EfficientDet: Scalable and Efficient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09070/) (2019)
- [DAB-DETR: Dynamic Anchor Boxes are Better Queries for DETR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12329/) (2022)
- [Bridging the Gap Between Anchor-based and Anchor-free Detection via Adaptive Training Sample Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02424/) (2019)
- [Sparse R-CNN: End-to-End Object Detection with Learnable Proposals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12450/) (2020)
- [Tracking Objects as Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01177/) (2020)
- [Cross-stitch Networks for Multi-task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.03539/) (2016)
- [Cascade R-CNN: High Quality Object Detection and Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.09756/) (2019)
- [Conditional DETR for Fast Training Convergence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06152/) (2021)
- [Generalized Focal Loss: Learning Qualified and Distributed Bounding Boxes for Dense Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04388/) (2020)
- [Puzzle Mix: Exploiting Saliency and Local Statistics for Optimal Mixup](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.06962/) (2020)
- [Libra R-CNN: Towards Balanced Learning for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02701/) (2019)
- [VarifocalNet: An IoU-aware Dense Object Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.13367/) (2020)
- [PAD-Net: Multi-Tasks Guided Prediction-and-Distillation Network for Simultaneous Depth Estimation and Scene Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04409/) (2018)
- [TOOD: Task-aligned One-stage Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07755/) (2021)
- [RTMDet: An Empirical Study of Designing Real-Time Object Detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07784/) (2022)
- [Dynamic Head: Unifying Object Detection Heads with Attentions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08322/) (2021)
- [Gated-SCNN: Gated Shape CNNs for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05740/) (2019)
- [Scale-Aware Trident Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.01892/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [RPCANet++: Deep Interpretable Robust PCA for Sparse Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.04190/) (2025)
- [A Simple Detector with Frame Dynamics is a Strong Tracker](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.04917/) (2025)
- [RRCANet: Recurrent Reusable-Convolution Attention Network for Infrared Small Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02393/) (2025)
- [LAM-YOLO: Drones-based Small Object Detection on Lighting-Occlusion Attention Mechanism YOLO](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00485/) (2024)
- [DDFusion:Degradation-Decoupled Fusion Framework for Robust Infrared and Visible Images Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10871/) (2025)
- [DSCSNet: A Dynamic Sparse Compression Sensing Network for Closely-Spaced Infrared Small Target Unmixing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.21192/) (2026)
- [FSGNet: A Frequency-Aware and Semantic Guidance Network for Infrared Small Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.25389/) (2026)
- [SWAN: Synergistic Wavelet-Attention Network for Infrared Small Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01322/) (2025)
- [Dual-Domain Perspective on Degradation-Aware Fusion: A VLM-Guided Robust Infrared and Visible Image Fusion Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.05000/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Infrared small target detection presents significant challenges due to the limited intrinsic features of the target and the overwhelming presence of visually similar background distractors. We contend that background semantics are critical for distinguishing between objects that appear visually similar in this context. To address this challenge, we propose a task, clustered infrared small target detection, and introduce DenseSIRST, a benchmark dataset that provides per-pixel semantic annotations for background regions. This dataset facilitates the shift from sparse to dense target detection. This dataset facilitates the shift from sparse to dense target detection. Building on this resource, we propose the Background-Aware Feature Exchange Network (BAFE-Net), a multi-task architecture that jointly tackles target detection and background semantic segmentation. BAFE-Net incorporates a dynamic cross-task feature hard-exchange mechanism, enabling the effective exchange of target and background semantics between the two tasks. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that BAFE-Net significantly enhances target detection accuracy while mitigating false alarms. The DenseSIRST dataset, along with the code and trained models, is publicly available at https://github.com/GrokCV/BAFE-Net.