# DCCS-Det: Directional Context and Cross-Scale-Aware Detector for Infrared Small Target

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.16428 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.16428/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 68 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [UNet++: A Nested U-Net Architecture for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10165/) (2018)
- [VMamba: Visual State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10166/) (2024)
- [LocalMamba: Visual State Space Model with Windowed Selective Scan](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09338/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Large Selective Kernel Network for Remote Sensing Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09030/) (2023)
- [MedMamba: Vision Mamba for Medical Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03849/) (2024)
- [Rotate to Attend: Convolutional Triplet Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03045/) (2020)
- [Infrared Small Target Detection with Scale and Location Sensitivity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19366/) (2024)
- [RMT: Retentive Networks Meet Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11523/) (2023)
- [HVI: A New Color Space for Low-light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20272/) (2025)
- [SCTransNet: Spatial-channel Cross Transformer Network for Infrared Small Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.15583/) (2024)
- [MTU-Net: Multi-level TransUNet for Space-based Infrared Tiny Ship Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13756/) (2022)
- [IRSAM: Advancing Segment Anything Model for Infrared Small Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07520/) (2024)
- [MaIR: A Locality- and Continuity-Preserving Mamba for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.20066/) (2024)
- [Efficient Multi-Scale Attention Module with Cross-Spatial Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13563/) (2023)
- [Pinwheel-shaped Convolution and Scale-based Dynamic Loss for Infrared Small Target Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16986/) (2024)
- [Mamba as a Bridge: Where Vision Foundation Models Meet Vision Language Models for Domain-Generalized Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.03193/) (2025)
- [ESSAformer: Efficient Transformer for Hyperspectral Image Super-resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14010/) (2023)
- [HCF-Net: Hierarchical Context Fusion Network for Infrared Small Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10778/) (2024)
- [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)
- [MetaSeg: MetaFormer-based Global Contexts-aware Network for Efficient Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.07576/) (2024)
- [SignEye: Traffic Sign Interpretation from Vehicle First-Person View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.11507/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Infrared small target detection (IRSTD) is critical for applications like remote sensing and surveillance, which aims to identify small, low-contrast targets against complex backgrounds. However, existing methods often struggle with inadequate joint modeling of local-global features (harming target-background discrimination) or feature redundancy and semantic dilution (degrading target representation quality). To tackle these issues, we propose DCCS-Det (Directional Context and Cross-Scale Aware Detector for Infrared Small Target), a novel detector that incorporates a Dual-stream Saliency Enhancement (DSE) block and a Latent-aware Semantic Extraction and Aggregation (LaSEA) module. The DSE block integrates localized perception with direction-aware context aggregation to help capture long-range spatial dependencies and local details. On this basis, the LaSEA module mitigates feature degradation via cross-scale feature extraction and random pooling sampling strategies, enhancing discriminative features and suppressing noise. Extensive experiments show that DCCS-Det achieves state-of-the-art detection accuracy with competitive efficiency across multiple datasets. Ablation studies further validate the contributions of DSE and LaSEA in improving target perception and feature representation under complex scenarios. hrefhttps://huggingface.co/InPeerReview/InfraredSmallTargetDetection-IRSTD.DCCSDCCS-Det Official Code is Available Here!