# Seeing Through the Noise: Improving Infrared Small Target Detection and Segmentation from Noise Suppression Perspective

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06878 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06878/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Aug 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [EfficientDet: Scalable and Efficient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09070/) (2019)
- [Path Aggregation Network for Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01534/) (2018)
- [NAS-FPN: Learning Scalable Feature Pyramid Architecture for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07392/) (2019)
- [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 Feature Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.14082/) (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)
- [C2Former: Calibrated and Complementary Transformer for RGB-Infrared Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16175/) (2023)
- [Translation, Scale and Rotation: Cross-Modal Alignment Meets RGB-Infrared Vehicle Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13801/) (2022)
- [IRSAM: Advancing Segment Anything Model for Infrared Small Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07520/) (2024)
- [One-Stage Cascade Refinement Networks for Infrared Small Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08472/) (2022)
- [HS-FPN: High Frequency and Spatial Perception FPN for Tiny Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10116/) (2024)
- [E2E-MFD: Towards End-to-End Synchronous Multimodal Fusion Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09323/) (2024)
- [HCF-Net: Hierarchical Context Fusion Network for Infrared Small Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10778/) (2024)
- [UniRGB-IR: A Unified Framework for Visible-Infrared Semantic Tasks via Adapter Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.17360/) (2024)
- [EFLNet: Enhancing Feature Learning for Infrared Small Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14723/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [RGBT-GroundBench: Visual Grounding Beyond RGB in Complex Real-World Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.24561/) (2025)
- [Decoupled Motion Representation Learning for Moving Infrared Small Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.15286/) (2026)
- [Effective Receptive Field Ordering Matters for Infrared Small Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.23994/) (2026)
- [HyTBE: Hyperbolic Target-Background Expert Model for Cross-Domain Infrared Small Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.05771/) (2026)
- [Understand Before Detect: Vision--Language Learning for Omni-Domain Infrared Small Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.07015/) (2026)
- [SPARK-SAM: Learning How to Prompt and Respond for Infrared Small Target Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.20754/) (2026)
- [PICANet: Physics-Informed Cascaded Asymmetric Network for Infrared Small Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.07515/) (2026)
- [IRSTD-Agent: Agentic Infrared Small Target Detection via Zoom-Guided Interaction Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.05342/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Infrared small target detection and segmentation (IRSTDS) is a critical yet challenging task in defense and civilian applications, owing to the dim, shapeless appearance of targets and severe background clutter. Recent CNN-based methods have achieved promising target perception results, but they only focus on enhancing feature representation to offset the impact of noise, which results in the increased false alarm problem. In this paper, through analyzing the problem from the frequency domain, we pioneer in improving performance from noise suppression perspective and propose a novel noise-suppression feature pyramid network (NS-FPN), which integrates a low-frequency guided feature purification (LFP) module and a spiral-aware feature sampling (SFS) module into the original FPN structure. The LFP module suppresses the noise features by purifying high-frequency components to achieve feature enhancement devoid of noise interference, while the SFS module further adopts spiral sampling to fuse target-relevant features in feature fusion process. Our NS-FPN is designed to be lightweight yet effective and can be easily plugged into existing IRSTDS frameworks. Extensive experiments on the IRSTD-1k and NUAA-SIRST datasets demonstrate that our method significantly reduces false alarms and achieves superior performance on IRSTDS task.