Methods for detecting small infrared targets in complex scenes are widely utilized across various domains. Traditional methods have drawbacks such as a poor clutter suppression ability and a high number of edge residuals in the detection results in complex scenes. To address these issues, we propose a method based on a joint new norm and self-attention mechanism of low-rank sparse inversion. Firstly, we propose a new tensor nuclear norm based on linear transformation, which globally constrains the low-rank characteristics of the image background and makes full use of the structural information among tensor slices to better approximate the rank of the non-convex tensor, thus achieving effective background suppression. Secondly, we construct a self-attention mechanism in order to constrain the sparse characteristics of the target, which further eliminates any edge residuals in the detection results by transforming the local feature information into a weight matrix to further constrain the target component. Finally, we use the alternating direction multiplier method to decompose the newly reconstructed objective function and introduce a reweighted strategy to accelerate the convergence speed of the model. The average values of the three evaluation metrics, SSIM, BSF, and SNR, for the algorithm proposed in this paper are 0.9997, 467.23, and 11.72, respectively. Meanwhile, the proposed detection method obtains a higher detection rate compared with other algorithms under the same false alarm rate.
Keywords: alternating direction multiplier method; infrared target detection; linear transformation; new norm; self-attention mechanism.