Self-supervised learning (SSL) for RGB images has achieved significant success, yet there is still limited research on SSL for infrared images, primarily due to three prominent challenges: 1) the lack of a suitable large-scale infrared pre-training dataset, 2) the distinctiveness of non-iconic infrared images rendering common pre-training tasks like masked image modeling (MIM) less effective, and 3) the scarcity of fine-grained textures making it particularly challenging to learn general image features. To address these issues, we construct a Multi-Scene Infrared Pre-training (MSIP) dataset comprising 178,756 images, and introduce object-sensitive random RoI cropping, an image preprocessing method, to tackle the challenge posed by non-iconic images. To alleviate the impact of weak textures on feature learning, we propose a pre-training paradigm called Pre-training with ADapter (PAD), which uses adapters to learn domain-specific features while freezing parameters pre-trained on ImageNet to retain the general feature extraction capability. This new paradigm is applicable to any transformer-based SSL method. Furthermore, to achieve more flexible coordination between pre-trained and newly-learned features in different layers and patches, a patchwise-scale adapter with dynamically learnable scale factors is introduced. Extensive experiments on three downstream tasks show that PAD, with only 1.23M pre-trainable parameters, outperforms other baseline paradigms including continual full pre-training on MSIP. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/casiatao/PAD.

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