DRUNet: A Method for Infrared Point Target Detection

Deep learning is widely used in vision tasks, but feature extraction of IR small targets is difficult due to the inconspicuous contours and lack of color information. This paper proposes a new convolutional neural network–based (CNN-based) method for IR small target detection called DRUNet. The algorithm is divided into two parts: the feature extraction network and the prediction head. For the small IR targets, which are difficult to accurately label, Gaussian soft labels are added to supervise the training process and make the network converge faster. We use a simplified object keypoint similarity to evaluate the network accuracy by the ratio of the distance to the radius of the inner tangent circle of the target box and a fair method for evaluating the model inference speed after GPU preheating. The experimental results show that our proposed algorithm performs better when compared with commonly used algorithms in the field of small target detection. The model size is 10.5 M, and the test speed reaches 133 FPS under the RTX3090 experimental platform.