Degraded Infrared Small Object Detection via Degradation-Adapted Physics-Guided Restoration

Abstract

Infrared small object detection has made significant progress in recent years. However, degradations such as fog and nonuniformity can suppress target-background contrast, substantially increasing detection difficulty. Existing methods mainly rely on image restoration as preprocessing, but they are typically designed for specific degradation types and fail to generalize to varying degradations. To alleviate this, we propose DAISOD, a degradation-adapted infrared small object detection framework for robust detection under different degradations. DAISOD first identifies the type and severity of degradations, then adapts the processing via dedicated branches, and finally fuses the results for subsequent detection. Moreover, a physics-guided restoration mechanism is incorporated to explicitly estimate degradation parameters and remove degradation effects through physical models, avoiding excessive restoration that may erase small targets. Moreover, we construct a degraded infrared small object detection dataset covering diverse degradation types and levels. Extensive experiments show that DAISOD outperforms state-of-the-art methods under various degradation conditions.