Infrared Ship Target Detection Model Integrating Criss-Cross Attention and Dual Feature Interaction

To address the issues of low target pixels, complex background, and limited hardware resources in infrared image target detection, a target detection model that incorporates a multihead cross-attention mechanism with position coding and a two-feature interaction refinement structure is proposed. In the backbone network, a location coding-based cross-attention module called Criss-Cross Attention (CCA) and a Spatial Pyramid Pooling Cross Stage Partial (SPCP) module are introduced. The CCA module transforms the correlation matrix by rows and columns horizontally. This module aggregates contextual information in the horizontal and vertical directions via row and column correlation matrix transformations and enhances feature extraction by sharing the parameters of the recursive interleaving module, which reduces the number of parameters required for the self-attention mechanism. The SPCP module reduces the number of parameters and computations by unifying feature mappings of different sizes and scales, adopting a Cross Stage Partial (CSP) structure, and introducing a squeeze incentive. The attention mechanism selects channels that are more favorable for target detection. In the neck network, frequency-domain information and a Dual Feature Interaction Refinement (DIR) module are introduced to further extract the refined features of small target ships and enhance the feature fusion capability of the model. The improved model achieves 89.5% precision, 97% recall, and 93.1% F1 score on an Infrared Ship Detection Dataset (ISDD). This significantly improves the detection performance compared with that of the benchmark model. Additionally, the proposed model reduces the number of computational parameters compared with other detection models. The experimental results show that the multihead cross-attention mechanism with fused position coding and two-feature interaction refinement structure effectively improves the accuracy of infrared ship target detection.