# It's Not the Target, It's the Background: Rethinking Infrared Small Target Detection via Deep Patch-Free Low-Rank Representations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.10425 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.10425/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 85 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Jun 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [Group Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08494/) (2018)
- [Beyond a Gaussian Denoiser: Residual Learning of Deep CNN for Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03981/) (2016)
- [Going deeper with Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.17239/) (2021)
- [Deep Equilibrium Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01377/) (2019)
- [FFDNet: Toward a Fast and Flexible Solution for CNN based Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.04026/) (2017)
- [DeepViT: Towards Deeper Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11886/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Attentional Local Contrast Networks for Infrared Small Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.08573/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Infrared Small Target Detection with Scale and Location Sensitivity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19366/) (2024)
- [SCTransNet: Spatial-channel Cross Transformer Network for Infrared Small Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.15583/) (2024)
- [SHViT: Single-Head Vision Transformer with Memory Efficient Macro Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16456/) (2024)
- [MTU-Net: Multi-level TransUNet for Space-based Infrared Tiny Ship Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13756/) (2022)
- [Low-Rank Tensor Function Representation for Multi-Dimensional Data Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00262/) (2022)
- [RPCANet: Deep Unfolding RPCA Based Infrared Small Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.00917/) (2023)
- [Guaranteed Tensor Recovery Fused Low-rankness and Smoothness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.02155/) (2023)
- [Pinwheel-shaped Convolution and Scale-based Dynamic Loss for Infrared Small Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16986/) (2024)
- [Tensor Low-Rank Reconstruction for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.00490/) (2020)
- [Revisiting Residual Networks for Adversarial Robustness: An Architectural Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.11005/) (2022)
- [A Unified Framework for U-Net Design and Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19638/) (2023)
- [A Simple yet Effective Network based on Vision Transformer for Camouflaged Object and Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18922/) (2024)
- [ILNet: Low-level Matters for Salient Infrared Small Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13646/) (2023)
- [Rotation Equivariant Proximal Operator for Deep Unfolding Methods in Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.15701/) (2023)
- [Pick of the Bunch: Detecting Infrared Small Targets Beyond Hit-Miss Trade-Offs via Selective Rank-Aware Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03717/) (2024)
- [ABC: Attention with Bilinear Correlation for Infrared Small Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10321/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [You Only Look Omni Gradient Backpropagation for Moving Infrared Small Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.13013/) (2025)
- [RDANet: Relative Degradation Aware Network for Infrared Small Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.20870/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

textcolorblueThis is the pre-acceptance version, to read the final version please go to hrefhttps://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11156113IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing on IEEE Xplore. Infrared small target detection (IRSTD) remains a long-standing challenge in complex backgrounds due to low signal-to-clutter ratios (SCR), diverse target morphologies, and the absence of distinctive visual cues. While recent deep learning approaches aim to learn discriminative representations, the intrinsic variability and weak priors of small targets often lead to unstable performance. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end IRSTD framework, termed LRRNet, which leverages the low-rank property of infrared image backgrounds. Inspired by the physical compressibility of cluttered scenes, our approach adopts a compression--reconstruction--subtraction (CRS) paradigm to directly model structure-aware low-rank background representations in the image domain, without relying on patch-based processing or explicit matrix decomposition. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to directly learn low-rank background structures using deep neural networks in an end-to-end manner. Extensive experiments on multiple public datasets demonstrate that LRRNet outperforms 38 state-of-the-art methods in terms of detection accuracy, robustness, and computational efficiency. Remarkably, it achieves real-time performance with an average speed of 82.34 FPS. Evaluations on the challenging NoisySIRST dataset further confirm the model's resilience to sensor noise. The source code will be made publicly available upon acceptance.