# Weakly-supervised Contrastive Learning with Quantity Prompts for Moving Infrared Small Target Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.02454 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02454/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 77 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Generalized Intersection over Union: A Metric and A Loss for Bounding Box Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09630/) (2019)
- [YOLOX: Exceeding YOLO Series in 2021](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08430/) (2021)
- [DetCo: Unsupervised Contrastive Learning for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04803/) (2021)
- [Weakly Supervised Deep Detection Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.02853/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Multiple Instance Detection Network with Online Instance Classifier Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00138/) (2017)
- [Multiscale Combinatorial Grouping for Image Segmentation and Object Proposal Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.00848/) (2015)
- [Weakly Supervised Object Localization and Detection: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07918/) (2021)
- [TransVOD: End-to-End Video Object Detection with Spatial-Temporal Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05047/) (2022)
- [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)
- [IRSAM: Advancing Segment Anything Model for Infrared Small Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07520/) (2024)
- [RPCANet: Deep Unfolding RPCA Based Infrared Small Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.00917/) (2023)
- [SAM-Assisted Remote Sensing Imagery Semantic Segmentation with Object and Boundary Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02464/) (2023)
- [Test-Time Adaptation with SaLIP: A Cascade of SAM and CLIP for Zero shot Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06362/) (2024)
- [Self-Sampling Meta SAM: Enhancing Few-shot Medical Image Segmentation with Meta-Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16466/) (2023)
- [SIRST-5K: Exploring Massive Negatives Synthesis with Self-supervised Learning for Robust Infrared Small Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05416/) (2024)
- [Triple-domain Feature Learning with Frequency-aware Memory Enhancement for Moving Infrared Small Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06949/) (2024)
- [Crowd-SAM: SAM as a Smart Annotator for Object Detection in Crowded Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11464/) (2024)
- [InfMAE: A Foundation Model in the Infrared Modality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00407/) (2024)
- [WeakSAM: Segment Anything Meets Weakly-supervised Instance-level Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14812/) (2024)
- [A Robust Visual System for Small Target Motion Detection Against Cluttered Moving Backgrounds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04363/) (2019)
- [Cyclic-Bootstrap Labeling for Weakly Supervised Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05991/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Boosting Infrared Small Target Detection via Logit-Domain Contrast and Adaptive Shape Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.01555/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Different from general object detection, moving infrared small target detection faces huge challenges due to tiny target size and weak background contrast.Currently, most existing methods are fully-supervised, heavily relying on a large number of manual target-wise annotations. However, manually annotating video sequences is often expensive and time-consuming, especially for low-quality infrared frame images. Inspired by general object detection, non-fully supervised strategies (e.g., weakly supervised) are believed to be potential in reducing annotation requirements. To break through traditional fully-supervised frameworks, as the first exploration work, this paper proposes a new weakly-supervised contrastive learning (WeCoL) scheme, only requires simple target quantity prompts during model training.Specifically, in our scheme, based on the pretrained segment anything model (SAM), a potential target mining strategy is designed to integrate target activation maps and multi-frame energy accumulation.Besides, contrastive learning is adopted to further improve the reliability of pseudo-labels, by calculating the similarity between positive and negative samples in feature subspace.Moreover, we propose a long-short term motion-aware learning scheme to simultaneously model the local motion patterns and global motion trajectory of small targets.The extensive experiments on two public datasets (DAUB and ITSDT-15K) verify that our weakly-supervised scheme could often outperform early fully-supervised methods. Even, its performance could reach over 90% of state-of-the-art (SOTA) fully-supervised ones.