Ivan-ISTD: Rethinking Cross-domain Heteroscedastic Noise Perturbations in Infrared Small Target Detection

Abstract: In the multimedia domain, Infrared Small Target Detection (ISTD) plays a important role in drone-based multi-modality sensing. To address the dual challenges of cross-domain shift and heteroscedastic noise perturbations in ISTD, we propose a doubly wavelet-guided Invariance learning framework(Ivan-ISTD). In the first stage, we generate training samples aligned with the target domain using Wavelet-guided Cross-domain Synthesis. This wavelet-guided alignment machine accurately separates the target background through multi-frequency wavelet filtering. In the second stage, we introduce Real-domain Noise Invariance Learning, which extracts real noise characteristics from the target domain to build a dynamic noise library. The model learns noise invariance through self-supervised loss, thereby overcoming the limitations of distribution bias in traditional artificial noise modeling. Finally, we create the Dynamic-ISTD Benchmark, a cross-domain dynamic degradation dataset that simulates the distribution shifts encountered in real-world applications. Additionally, we validate the versatility of our method using other real-world datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of many quantitative metrics. In particular, Ivan-ISTD demonstrates excellent robustness in cross-domain scenarios. The code for this work can be found at: https://github.com/nanjin1/Ivan-ISTD.