Aw-DuNet: Adaptive-Weight Deep Unfolding Network for High Precision Infrared Weak Target Segmentation

Deep learning (DL) methods have achieved promising performance in infrared weak target segmentation. However, their interpretability and robustness against cluttered backgrounds and noise remain limited. We propose an adaptive-weighted deep unfolding network (AwDuNet) that unfolds alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) iterations for adaptive sparse–low-rank decomposition into multi-stage interpretable modules for end-to-end training. An adaptive weight matrix is jointly estimated from a local structural-difference matrix and a sparse-enhancement matrix, thereby strengthening target–background separation while preserving fine target details. To suppress background clutter, we design a dual-path complementary attention (DCA) mechanism for the low-rank background reconstruction module (LBRM), which improves low-rank background modeling by jointly leveraging spatial and channel attention. By extracting local details and global context in parallel, DCA enhances weak-target responses and mitigates interference from complex backgrounds. We also build a real-scene infrared dataset with 632 images for out-of-domain evaluation. The model is tested without fine-tuning after training on public datasets to assess practical robustness. Experiments on multiple public datasets validate the effectiveness and generalization of AwDuNet.