Work

Aw-DuNet: Adaptive-Weight Deep Unfolding Network for High Precision Infrared Weak Target Segmentation

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: Deep learning (DL) methods have achieved promising performance in infrared weak target segmentation. However, their interpretability and robustness against cluttered backgrounds and noise remain limited. We propose an adaptive-weighted deep unfolding network (AwDuNet) that unfolds alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) iterations for adaptive sparse–low-rank decomposition into multi-stage interpretable modules for end-to-end training. An adaptive weight matrix is jointly estimated from a local structural-difference matrix and a sparse-enhancement matrix, thereby strengthening target–background separation while preserving fine target details. To suppress background clutter, we design a dual-path complementary attention (DCA) mechanism for the low-rank background reconstruction module (LBRM), which improves low-rank background modeling by jointly leveraging spatial and channel attention. By extracting local details and global context in parallel, DCA enhances weak-target responses and mitigates interference from complex backgrounds. We also build a real-scene infrared dataset with 632 images for out-of-domain evaluation. The model is tested without fine-tuning after training on public datasets to assess practical robustness. Experiments on multiple public datasets validate the effectiveness and generalization of AwDuNet.

Source: Applied Sciences

DOI: 10.3390/app16083767