It’s Not the Target, It’s the Background: Rethinking Infrared Small-Target Detection via Deep Patch-Free Low-Rank Representations

Infrared small-target detection (IRSTD) remains a long-standing challenge in complex backgrounds due to low signal-to-clutter ratios (SCRs), diverse target morphologies, and the absence of distinctive visual cues. While recent deep learning approaches aim to learn discriminative representations, the intrinsic variability and weak priors of small targets often lead to unstable performance. In this article, we propose a novel end-to-end IRSTD framework, termed low-rank representation network (LRRNet), which leverages the low-rank property of infrared image backgrounds. Inspired by the physical compressibility of cluttered scenes, our approach adopts a compression–reconstruction–subtraction (CRS) paradigm to directly model structure-aware low-rank background representations in the image domain, without relying on patch-based processing or explicit matrix decomposition. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to directly learn low-rank background structures using deep neural networks in an end-to-end manner. Extensive experiments on multiple public datasets demonstrate that LRRNet outperforms 38 state-of-the-art methods in terms of detection accuracy, robustness, and computational efficiency. Remarkably, it achieves real-time performance with an average speed of 82.34 FPS. Evaluations on the challenging NoisySIRST dataset further confirm the model’s resilience to sensor noise. The source code will be made publicly available upon acceptance.