Enhancing Infrared Small Target Detection Robustness with Bi-Level
  Adversarial Framework
Zhu Liu Zihang Chen Jinyuan Liu Long Ma Xin Fan Risheng Liu
The detection of small infrared targets against blurred and cluttered
backgrounds has remained an enduring challenge. In recent years, learning-based
schemes have become the mainstream methodology to establish the mapping
directly. However, these methods are susceptible to the inherent complexities
of changing backgrounds and real-world disturbances, leading to unreliable and
compromised target estimations. In this work, we propose a bi-level adversarial
framework to promote the robustness of detection in the presence of distinct
corruptions. We first propose a bi-level optimization formulation to introduce
dynamic adversarial learning. Specifically, it is composited by the learnable
generation of corruptions to maximize the losses as the lower-level objective
and the robustness promotion of detectors as the upper-level one. We also
provide a hierarchical reinforced learning strategy to discover the most
detrimental corruptions and balance the performance between robustness and
accuracy. To better disentangle the corruptions from salient features, we also
propose a spatial-frequency interaction network for target detection. Extensive
experiments demonstrate our scheme remarkably improves 21.96% IOU across a wide
array of corruptions and notably promotes 4.97% IOU on the general benchmark.
The source codes are available at https://github.com/LiuZhu-CV/BALISTD.