MCC-Net: Efficient Dual-Attention Network for Infrared Small-Target Detection

Recent years have witnessed the emergence of numerous U-shaped deep learning segmentation methods for infrared small-target detection (IRSTD). However, increasingly complex models still suffer from false and missed detections in challenging scenarios with cluttered backgrounds and weak targets while incurring escalating computational costs. To address these limitations, this paper proposes MCC-Net, a novel and efficient IRSTD framework that achieves superior detection performance with significantly reduced computational complexity. First, we integrate Magnitude-Aware Linear Attention (MALA) and Conditionally Parameterized Convolutions (CondConv) to replace conventional attention mechanisms in skip connections and standard convolutions, respectively, endowing the model with spatial contextual modeling and enhanced feature extraction capabilities at minimal computational overhead. Second, we design an innovative Conditional Cross-Channel Fusion (CondCCF) module that establishes a complementary spatial-channel dual-attention mechanism with MALA, enabling efficient multi-scale feature fusion. Extensive comparative and ablation experiments conducted on three public benchmarks—SIRST-v1, NUDT-SIRST, and IRSTD-1K—demonstrate that MCC-Net achieves state-of-the-art mIoU scores of 77.98%, 95.43%, and 70.46%, respectively, surpassing state-of-the-art methods by 1.07%, 1.95%, and 0.95%. MCC-Net also outperforms existing approaches across multiple evaluation metrics while maintaining substantially lower computational complexity.