# SeqCSIST: Sequential Closely-Spaced Infrared Small Target Unmixing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09556 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.09556/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [Photo-Realistic Single Image Super-Resolution Using a Generative Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.04802/) (2016)
- [Enhanced Deep Residual Networks for Single Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.02921/) (2017)
- [Deformable Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06211/) (2017)
- [ESRGAN: Enhanced Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00219/) (2018)
- [Image Super-Resolution Using Deep Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1501.00092/) (2014)
- [Real-Time Single Image and Video Super-Resolution Using an Efficient Sub-Pixel Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.05158/) (2016)
- [FlowNet: Learning Optical Flow with Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.06852/) (2015)
- [Residual Dense Network for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08797/) (2018)
- [Designing a Practical Degradation Model for Deep Blind Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14006/) (2021)
- [Deep Unfolding Network for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.10428/) (2020)
- [TDAN: Temporally Deformable Alignment Network for Video Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02898/) (2018)
- [Deep Back-Projection Networks For Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.02735/) (2018)
- [Dense Nested Attention Network for Infrared Small Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00487/) (2021)
- [Memory Enhanced Global-Local Aggregation for Video Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12063/) (2020)
- [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)
- [LoGoNet: Towards Accurate 3D Object Detection with Local-to-Global Cross-Modal Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03595/) (2023)
- [FISTA-Net: Learning A Fast Iterative Shrinkage Thresholding Network for Inverse Problems in Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02683/) (2020)
- [Infrared Small Target Detection with Scale and Location Sensitivity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19366/) (2024)
- [Learned D-AMP: Principled Neural Network based Compressive Image Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.06625/) (2017)
- [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)
- [ISTA-Net++: Flexible Deep Unfolding Network for Compressive Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11554/) (2021)
- [Improving Misaligned Multi-modality Image Fusion with One-stage Progressive Dense Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11165/) (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)
- [Gated Multiple Feedback Network for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.04253/) (2019)
- [Unleashing the Power of Generic Segmentation Models: A Simple Baseline for Infrared Small Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.04714/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Beyond Motion Cues and Structural Sparsity: Revisiting Small Moving Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.07654/) (2025)
- [DSCSNet: A Dynamic Sparse Compression Sensing Network for Closely-Spaced Infrared Small Target Unmixing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.21192/) (2026)
- [Beyond Unfolding: 60x Faster One-Stage Unmixing for Closely-Spaced Infrared Small Targets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.16007/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Due to the limitation of the optical lens focal length and the resolution of the infrared detector, distant Closely-Spaced Infrared Small Target (CSIST) groups typically appear as mixing spots in the infrared image. In this paper, we propose a novel task, Sequential CSIST Unmixing, namely detecting all targets in the form of sub-pixel localization from a highly dense CSIST group. However, achieving such precise detection is an extremely difficult challenge. In addition, the lack of high-quality public datasets has also restricted the research progress. To this end, firstly, we contribute an open-source ecosystem, including SeqCSIST, a sequential benchmark dataset, and a toolkit that provides objective evaluation metrics for this special task, along with the implementation of 23 relevant methods. Furthermore, we propose the Deformable Refinement Network (DeRefNet), a model-driven deep learning framework that introduces a Temporal Deformable Feature Alignment (TDFA) module enabling adaptive inter-frame information aggregation. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first endeavor to address the CSIST Unmixing task within a multi-frame paradigm. Experiments on the SeqCSIST dataset demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches with mean Average Precision (mAP) metric improved by 5.3%. Our dataset and toolkit are available from https://github.com/GrokCV/SeqCSIST.