用在线特征传播实现单点监督红外小目标检测,大幅降低误报率。
Exploring the Limits of End-to-End Feature-Affinity Propagation for Single-Point Supervised Infrared Small Target Detection

- 通过批次内点锚定特征亲和传播生成在线标签,无需外部伪标签循环。
- 在SIRST3上实现0.6674 mIoU,误报率比PAL降低38%。
- 适合对误报敏感的部署场景,如军事监控与自动驾驶感知。
单点监督红外小目标检测显著降低了密集标注成本。当前最先进方法通过显式离线伪标签构建(如多阶段主动学习、物理驱动掩码生成)恢复掩码监督,实现高精度。本文提出一种极简替代方案:通过批次内、点锚定的特征亲和传播在线生成点到掩码的监督信号。我们将其实例化为GSACP,一个端到端测试平台,直接使用由局部图像先验门控的硬边缘特征亲和性监督检测器,彻底消除外部标签演化环路。然而,该紧凑设计暴露了优化瓶颈:亲和目标由待优化的特征表示生成,导致训练形成自指循环。我们从理论上形式化此现象为‘自指传播漂移’,即表示与监督的纠缠,可能锐化真实边界或扭曲特征空间以满足自身目标。为系统分离这些失败模式,我们采用协议化单变量消融流程,涵盖局部EMA教师解耦、硬背景对比分离和自适应支持几何。在SIRST3数据集上,GSACP-Final建立新的超低误报操作范式,实现0.6674 mIoU,相比PAL减少38%的误报伪影(Fa)。通过系统解构端到端范式,我们绘制其性能边界,表明批次内特征传播为误报抑制至关重要的部署场景提供了紧凑替代方案。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Single-point supervised infrared small target detection (IRSTD) drastically reduces dense annotation costs. Current state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods achieve high precision by recovering mask supervision through explicit, offline pseudo-label construction, such as multi-stage active learning and physics-driven mask generation. In this paper, we study a minimalist alternative: generating point-to-mask supervision online through in-batch, point-anchored feature-affinity propagation. We instantiate this paradigm as GSACP, an end-to-end testbed that directly supervises the detector using hard-margin feature affinity gated by local image priors, entirely eliminating external label-evolution loops. This compact design, however, exposes an optimization bottleneck. Because the affinity target is generated from the same feature representation being optimized, training forms a self-referential loop. We theoretically formalize this as \emph{Self-Referential Propagation Drift}, a representation-supervision entanglement that can sharpen true boundaries or distort the feature space to satisfy its own targets. To systematically isolate these failure modes, we apply a protocolized single-variable ablation procedure spanning local EMA teacher decoupling, hard-background contrastive separation, and adaptive support geometry. On the SIRST3 dataset, GSACP-Final establishes a new ultra-low false-alarm operating regime, achieving a highly competitive $0.6674$ mIoU while demonstrating a $38\% relative reduction in false-positive artifacts ($\mathrm{Fa}$) compared with PAL. By systematically deconstructing the end-to-end paradigm, we map its performance boundaries and show that in-batch feature propagation provides a compact alternative for deployment scenarios where false-alarm suppression is paramount.
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