Pinwheel-shaped Convolution and Scale-based Dynamic Loss for Infrared Small Target Detection

These recent years have witnessed that convolutional neural network (CNN)-based methods for detecting infrared small targets have achieved outstanding performance. However, these methods typically employ standard convolutions, neglecting to consider the spatial characteristics of the pixel distribution of infrared small targets. Therefore, we propose a novel pinwheel-shaped convolution (PConv) as a replacement for standard convolutions in the lower layers of the backbone network. PConv better aligns with the Gaussian-like spatial distribution of infrared small target, improves feature extraction, significantly expands the receptive field, and introduces only a minimal increase in parameters. Additionally,…