While large-scale visual foundation models (VFMs) exhibit strong generalization across diverse visual domains, their potential for single-frame infrared small target (SIRST) detection remains largely unexplored. To fill this gap, we first systematically introduce frozen VFM representations into the SIRST task and propose a Foundation-Driven Efficient Paradigm (FDEP), a general and efficient framework compatible with diverse VFMs and SIRST networks, which improves detection accuracy without additional VFM-related inference overhead. Specifically, a Semantic Alignment and Modulated Fusion (SAMF) module is designed to achieve dynamic alignment and deep fusion of the global semantic priors from VFMs with task-specific features. Meanwhile, to avoid the inference-time overhead introduced by VFMs, we propose a Collaborative Optimization-based Implicit Self-Distillation (CO-ISD) strategy, which enables implicit semantic transfer between the main and lightweight branches through parameter sharing and synchronized backpropagation. In addition, to unify the fragmented evaluation system, we construct a Holistic SIRST Evaluation (HSE) metric that performs multi-threshold integral evaluation at both pixel-level confidence and target-level robustness, providing a stable and comprehensive basis for fair model comparison. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the SIRST detection networks equipped with our FDEP framework achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on multiple public datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/YuChuang1205/FDEP-Framework
Chuang Yu, Yunpeng Liu, Jinmiao Zhao, Ao Chen, Xiujun Shu, Bo Wang, Zelin Shi, Xiangyu Yue
Recently, cross-spectral image patch matching based on feature relation learning has attracted extensive attention. However, existing methods focus on mining richer feature relations by building complex relation extraction structures. Meanwhile, performance bottlenecks have gradually emerged. To address this, we make the first attempt to explore a stable and efficient bridge between descriptor learning and metric learning, and construct a Knowledge-Guided Learning Network (KGL-Net), which achieves significant performance improvements while abandoning complex network structures. Specifically, we find that there is feature extraction consistency between metric learning based on feature difference learning and descriptor learning based on Euclidean distance. This provides the foundation for bridge building. To ensure the stability and efficiency of the constructed bridge, on the one hand, we conduct an in-depth exploration of 20 combined network architectures. On the other hand, a feature-guided loss is constructed to achieve mutual guidance of features. In addition, unlike existing methods, we consider that the feature mapping ability of the metric branch should receive more attention. Therefore, a hard negative sample mining for metric learning (HNSM-M) strategy is constructed. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that hard negative sample mining for metric networks has been implemented and brings significant performance gains. Extensive experimental results show that our KGL-Net achieves SOTA performance in multiple cross-spectral image patch matching datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/YuChuang1205/KGL-Net
Recently, feature relation learning has drawn widespread attention in cross-spectral image patch matching. However, existing related research focuses on capturing diverse feature relations between image patches and ignores sufficient intrinsic feature representations of individual image patches. To address this limitation, we propose an innovative relational representation learning that simultaneously focuses on sufficiently mining the intrinsic features of individual image patches and the feature relations between image patches. Based on this, we construct a Relational Representation Learning Network (RRL-Net). Specifically, we innovatively construct an autoencoder to effectively characterize the individual intrinsic features, and introduce a feature interaction learning (FIL) module to extract deep-level feature relations. Meanwhile, to further fully mine individual intrinsic features, a lightweight multi-dimensional global-to-local attention (MGLA) module is constructed to enhance the global feature extraction of individual image patches and capture local dependencies within global features. By combining the MGLA module, we further explore the feature extraction network and construct an attention-based lightweight feature extraction (ALFE) network. Furthermore, a multi-loss post-pruning (MLPP) optimization strategy is proposed, which can greatly facilitate network optimization while avoiding increases in parameters and inference time. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our RRL-Net achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on multiple public datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/YuChuang1205/RRL-Net