vSTMD: Visual Motion Detection for Extremely Tiny Target at Various Velocities.

Abstract

Visual motion detection for extremely tiny (ET-) targets is challenging, due to their category-independent nature and the scarcity of visual cues, which often incapacitate mainstream feature-based models. Natural architectures with rich interpretability offer a promising alternative, where STMD architectures derived from insect visual STMD (Small Target Motion Detector) pathways have demonstrated their effectiveness. However, previous STMD models are constrained to a narrow velocity range, hindering their efficacy in real-world scenarios where targets exhibit diverse and unstable dynamics. To address this limitation, we present vSTMD, a learning-free model for motion detection of ET-targets at various velocities. vSTMD proposes two key mechanisms: cross-Inhibition Dynamic Potential (cIDP) and Collaborative Directional Gradient Calculation (CDGC). Specifically, cIDP serves as a self-adaptive mechanism, efficiently capturing motion cues across a wide velocity spectrum. CDGC enhances orienting accuracy and robustness while reducing computational overhead to one-eighth of previously isolated strategies. Evaluated on the real-world dataset RIST, the proposed vSTMD and its feedback-facilitated variant vSTMD-F achieve relative F₁ gains of 30% and 58% over state-of-the-art STMD approaches, respectively. Furthermore, both models demonstrate competitive orientation estimation performance compared to SOTA deep learning-driven methods. Experiments also reveal the superiority of the natural architecture for ET-object motion detection - vSTMD is 60× faster than contemporary data-driven methods, making it highly suitable for real-time applications in dynamic scenarios and complex backgrounds. Code is available at Project Repository.