SANet: Selective Attention Network for Infrared Small Target Detection
This study addresses the challenge of balancing detection accuracy and false alarm rate in infrared small target detection by proposing a selective attention network. Specifically, a dual-path semantic perception module is designed, integrating standard and pinwheel-shaped convolutions with spatial-channel attention mechanisms to enhance target-background discrimination. Furthermore, an adaptive feature fusion strategy employing spatially variable weights is introduced to overcome the limitations of static skip connections, thereby optimizing multi-scale feature integration. Extensive experiments on three public benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed method achieves up to a 4.32 percentage point improvement in IoU over the second-best approach, while significantly reducing the false alarm rate and increasing the detection probability.