Automatic video polyp segmentation plays a critical role in gastrointestinal cancer screening, but the cost of frameby-frame annotations is prohibitively high. While sparse-frame supervised methods have reduced this burden proportionately, the cost remains overwhelming for long-duration videos and large-scale datasets. In this paper, we, for the first time, reduce the annotation cost to just a single frame per polyp video, regardless of the video's length. To this end, we introduce a new task, First-Frame Supervised Video Polyp Segmentation (FSVPS), and propose a novel Propagative and Semantic Dual-Teacher Network (PSDNet). Specifically, PSDNet adopts a teacher-student framework but employs two distinct types of teachers: the propagative teacher and the semantic teacher. The propagative teacher is a universal object tracker that propagates the first-frame annotation to subsequent frames as pseudo labels. However, tracking errors may accumulate over time, gradually degrading the pseudo labels and misguiding the student model. To address this, we introduce the semantic teacher, an exponential moving average of the student model, which produces more stable and time-invariant pseudo labels. PSDNet merges the pseudo labels from both teachers using a carefully-designed back-propagation strategy. This strategy assesses the quality of the pseudo labels by tracking them backward to the first frame. High-quality pseudo labels are more likely to spatially align with the firstframe annotation after this backward tracking, ensuring more accurate teacher-to-student knowledge transfer and improved segmentation performance. Benchmarking on SUN-SEG, the largest VPS dataset, demonstrates the competitive performance of PSDNet compared to fully-supervised approaches, and its superiority over sparse-frame supervised state-of-the-arts with a minimum improvement of 4.5% in Dice score.
Automatic polyp segmentation is crucial for effective diagnosis and treatment in colonoscopy images. Traditional methods encounter significant challenges in accurately delineating polyps due to limitations in feature representation and the handling of variability in polyp appearance. Deep learning techniques, including CNN and Transformer-based methods, have been explored to improve polyp segmentation accuracy. However, existing approaches often neglect additional semantics, restricting their ability to acquire adequate contexts of polyps in colonoscopy images. In this paper, we propose an innovative method named ``Automatic Polyp Segmentation with Self-Enriched Semantic Model'' to address these limitations. First, we extract a sequence of features from an input image and decode high-level features to generate an initial segmentation mask. Using the proposed self-enriched semantic module, we query potential semantics and augment deep features with additional semantics, thereby aiding the model in understanding context more effectively. Extensive experiments show superior segmentation performance of the proposed method against state-of-the-art polyp segmentation baselines across five polyp benchmarks in both superior learning and generalization capabilities.
Diffusion Probabilistic Models have recently attracted significant attention in the community of computer vision due to their outstanding performance. However, while a substantial amount of diffusion-based research has focused on generative tasks, no work introduces diffusion models to advance the results of polyp segmentation in videos, which is frequently challenged by polyps' high camouflage and redundant temporal cues.In this paper, we present a novel diffusion-based network for video polyp segmentation task, dubbed as Diff-VPS. We incorporate multi-task supervision into diffusion models to promote the discrimination of diffusion models on pixel-by-pixel segmentation. This integrates the contextual high-level information achieved by the joint classification and detection tasks. To explore the temporal dependency, Temporal Reasoning Module (TRM) is devised via reasoning and reconstructing the target frame from the previous frames. We further equip TRM with a generative adversarial self-supervised strategy to produce more realistic frames and thus capture better dynamic cues. Extensive experiments are conducted on SUN-SEG, and the results indicate that our proposed Diff-VPS significantly achieves state-of-the-art performance. Code is available at https://github.com/lydia-yllu/Diff-VPS.
Regular screening and early discovery of uterine fibroid are crucial for preventing potential malignant transformations and ensuring timely, life-saving interventions. To this end, we collect and annotate the first ultrasound video dataset with 100 videos for uterine fibroid segmentation (UFUV). We also present Local-Global Reciprocal Network (LGRNet) to efficiently and effectively propagate the long-term temporal context which is crucial to help distinguish between uninformative noisy surrounding tissues and target lesion regions. Specifically, the Cyclic Neighborhood Propagation (CNP) is introduced to propagate the inter-frame local temporal context in a cyclic manner. Moreover, to aggregate global temporal context, we first condense each frame into a set of frame bottleneck queries and devise Hilbert Selective Scan (HilbertSS) to both efficiently path connect each frame and preserve the locality bias. A distribute layer is then utilized to disseminate back the global context for reciprocal refinement. Extensive experiments on UFUV and three public Video Polyp Segmentation (VPS) datasets demonstrate consistent improvements compared to state-of-the-art segmentation methods, indicating the effectiveness and versatility of LGRNet. Code, checkpoints, and dataset are available at https://github.com/bio-mlhui/LGRNet
Colonoscopy videos provide richer information in polyp segmentation for rectal cancer diagnosis. However, the endoscope's fast moving and close-up observing make the current methods suffer from large spatial incoherence and continuous low-quality frames, and thus yield limited segmentation accuracy. In this context, we focus on robust video polyp segmentation by enhancing the adjacent feature consistency and rebuilding the reliable polyp representation. To achieve this goal, we in this paper propose SALI network, a hybrid of Short-term Alignment Module (SAM) and Long-term Interaction Module (LIM). The SAM learns spatial-aligned features of adjacent frames via deformable convolution and further harmonizes them to capture more stable short-term polyp representation. In case of low-quality frames, the LIM stores the historical polyp representations as a long-term memory bank, and explores the retrospective relations to interactively rebuild more reliable polyp features for the current segmentation. Combing SAM and LIM, the SALI network of video segmentation shows a great robustness to the spatial variations and low-visual cues. Benchmark on the large-scale SUNSEG verifies the superiority of SALI over the current state-of-the-arts by improving Dice by 2.1%, 2.5%, 4.1% and 1.9%, for the four test sub-sets, respectively. Codes are at https://github.com/Scatteredrain/SALI.
Accurate segmentation of polyps from colonoscopy videos is of great significance to polyp treatment and early prevention of colorectal cancer. However, it is challenging due to the difficulties associated with modelling long-range spatio-temporal relationships within a colonoscopy video. In this paper, we address this challenging task with a novel Mixture-Attention Siamese Transformer (MAST), which explicitly models the long-range spatio-temporal relationships with a mixture-attention mechanism for accurate polyp segmentation. Specifically, we first construct a Siamese transformer architecture to jointly encode paired video frames for their feature representations. We then design a mixture-attention module to exploit the intra-frame and inter-frame correlations, enhancing the features with rich spatio-temporal relationships. Finally, the enhanced features are fed to two parallel decoders for predicting the segmentation maps. To the best of our knowledge, our MAST is the first transformer model dedicated to video polyp segmentation. Extensive experiments on the large-scale SUN-SEG benchmark demonstrate the superior performance of MAST in comparison with the cutting-edge competitors. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Junqing-Yang/MAST.
Breast lesion segmentation in ultrasound (US) videos is essential for diagnosing and treating axillary lymph node metastasis. However, the lack of a well-established and large-scale ultrasound video dataset with high-quality annotations has posed a persistent challenge for the research community. To overcome this issue, we meticulously curated a US video breast lesion segmentation dataset comprising 572 videos and 34,300 annotated frames, covering a wide range of realistic clinical scenarios. Furthermore, we propose a novel frequency and localization feature aggregation network (FLA-Net) that learns temporal features from the frequency domain and predicts additional lesion location positions to assist with breast lesion segmentation. We also devise a localization-based contrastive loss to reduce the lesion location distance between neighboring video frames within the same video and enlarge the location distances between frames from different ultrasound videos. Our experiments on our annotated dataset and two public video polyp segmentation datasets demonstrate that our proposed FLA-Net achieves state-of-the-art performance in breast lesion segmentation in US videos and video polyp segmentation while significantly reducing time and space complexity. Our model and dataset are available at https://github.com/jhl-Det/FLA-Net.
Meta recently released SAM (Segment Anything Model) which is a general-purpose segmentation model. SAM has shown promising results in a wide variety of segmentation tasks including medical image segmentation. In the field of medical image segmentation, polyp segmentation holds a position of high importance, thus creating a model which is robust and precise is quite challenging. Polyp segmentation is a fundamental task to ensure better diagnosis and cure of colorectal cancer. As such in this study, we will see how Polyp-SAM++, a text prompt-aided SAM, can better utilize a SAM using text prompting for robust and more precise polyp segmentation. We will evaluate the performance of a text-guided SAM on the polyp segmentation task on benchmark datasets. We will also compare the results of text-guided SAM vs unprompted SAM. With this study, we hope to advance the field of polyp segmentation and inspire more, intriguing research. The code and other details will be made publically available soon at https://github.com/RisabBiswas/Polyp-SAM++.
Limited by expensive pixel-level labels, polyp segmentation models are plagued by data shortage and suffer from impaired generalization. In contrast, polyp bounding box annotations are much cheaper and more accessible. Thus, to reduce labeling cost, we propose to learn a weakly supervised polyp segmentation model (i.e., WeakPolyp) completely based on bounding box annotations. However, coarse bounding boxes contain too much noise. To avoid interference, we introduce the mask-to-box (M2B) transformation. By supervising the outer box mask of the prediction instead of the prediction itself, M2B greatly mitigates the mismatch between the coarse label and the precise prediction. But, M2B only provides sparse supervision, leading to non-unique predictions. Therefore, we further propose a scale consistency (SC) loss for dense supervision. By explicitly aligning predictions across the same image at different scales, the SC loss largely reduces the variation of predictions. Note that our WeakPolyp is a plug-and-play model, which can be easily ported to other appealing backbones. Besides, the proposed modules are only used during training, bringing no computation cost to inference. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed WeakPolyp, which surprisingly achieves a comparable performance with a fully supervised model, requiring no mask annotations at all.
Noisy label problems are inevitably in existence within medical image segmentation causing severe performance degradation. Previous segmentation methods for noisy label problems only utilize a single image while the potential of leveraging the correlation between images has been overlooked. Especially for video segmentation, adjacent frames contain rich contextual information beneficial in cognizing noisy labels. Based on two insights, we propose a Multi-Scale Temporal Feature Affinity Learning (MS-TFAL) framework to resolve noisy-labeled medical video segmentation issues. First, we argue the sequential prior of videos is an effective reference, i.e., pixel-level features from adjacent frames are close in distance for the same class and far in distance otherwise. Therefore, Temporal Feature Affinity Learning (TFAL) is devised to indicate possible noisy labels by evaluating the affinity between pixels in two adjacent frames. We also notice that the noise distribution exhibits considerable variations across video, image, and pixel levels. In this way, we introduce Multi-Scale Supervision (MSS) to supervise the network from three different perspectives by re-weighting and refining the samples. This design enables the network to concentrate on clean samples in a coarse-to-fine manner. Experiments with both synthetic and real-world label noise demonstrate that our method outperforms recent state-of-the-art robust segmentation approaches. Code is available at https://github.com/BeileiCui/MS-TFAL.
We present the first comprehensive video polyp segmentation (VPS) study in the deep learning era. Over the years, developments in VPS are not moving forward with ease due to the lack of large-scale fine-grained segmentation annotations. To address this issue, we first introduce a high-quality frame-by-frame annotated VPS dataset, named SUN-SEG, which contains 158,690 colonoscopy frames from the well-known SUN-database. We provide additional annotations with diverse types, i.e., attribute, object mask, boundary, scribble, and polygon. Second, we design a simple but efficient baseline, dubbed PNS+, consisting of a global encoder, a local encoder, and normalized self-attention (NS) blocks. The global and local encoders receive an anchor frame and multiple successive frames to extract long-term and short-term spatial-temporal representations, which are then progressively updated by two NS blocks. Extensive experiments show that PNS+ achieves the best performance and real-time inference speed (170fps), making it a promising solution for the VPS task. Third, we extensively evaluate 13 representative polyp/object segmentation models on our SUN-SEG dataset and provide attribute-based comparisons. Finally, we discuss several open issues and suggest possible research directions for the VPS community.
Humans can easily segment moving objects without knowing what they are. That objectness could emerge from continuous visual observations motivates us to model grouping and movement concurrently from unlabeled videos. Our premise is that a video has different views of the same scene related by moving components, and the right region segmentation and region flow would allow mutual view synthesis which can be checked from the data itself without any external supervision. Our model starts with two separate pathways: an appearance pathway that outputs feature-based region segmentation for a single image, and a motion pathway that outputs motion features for a pair of images. It then binds them in a conjoint representation called segment flow that pools flow offsets over each region and provides a gross characterization of moving regions for the entire scene. By training the model to minimize view synthesis errors based on segment flow, our appearance and motion pathways learn region segmentation and flow estimation automatically without building them up from low-level edges or optical flows respectively. Our model demonstrates the surprising emergence of objectness in the appearance pathway, surpassing prior works on zero-shot object segmentation from an image, moving object segmentation from a video with unsupervised test-time adaptation, and semantic image segmentation by supervised fine-tuning. Our work is the first truly end-to-end zero-shot object segmentation from videos. It not only develops generic objectness for segmentation and tracking, but also outperforms prevalent image-based contrastive learning methods without augmentation engineering.
Previous video object segmentation approaches mainly focus on using simplex solutions between appearance and motion, limiting feature collaboration efficiency among and across these two cues. In this work, we study a novel and efficient full-duplex strategy network (FSNet) to address this issue, by considering a better mutual restraint scheme between motion and appearance in exploiting the cross-modal features from the fusion and decoding stage. Specifically, we introduce the relational cross-attention module (RCAM) to achieve bidirectional message propagation across embedding sub-spaces. To improve the model's robustness and update the inconsistent features from the spatial-temporal embeddings, we adopt the bidirectional purification module (BPM) after the RCAM. Extensive experiments on five popular benchmarks show that our FSNet is robust to various challenging scenarios (e.g., motion blur, occlusion) and achieves favourable performance against existing cutting-edges both in the video object segmentation and video salient object detection tasks. The project is publicly available at: https://dpfan.net/FSNet.
Colonoscopy is an effective technique for detecting colorectal polyps, which are highly related to colorectal cancer. In clinical practice, segmenting polyps from colonoscopy images is of great importance since it provides valuable information for diagnosis and surgery. However, accurate polyp segmentation is a challenging task, for two major reasons: (i) the same type of polyps has a diversity of size, color and texture; and (ii) the boundary between a polyp and its surrounding mucosa is not sharp. To address these challenges, we propose a parallel reverse attention network (PraNet) for accurate polyp segmentation in colonoscopy images. Specifically, we first aggregate the features in high-level layers using a parallel partial decoder (PPD). Based on the combined feature, we then generate a global map as the initial guidance area for the following components. In addition, we mine the boundary cues using a reverse attention (RA) module, which is able to establish the relationship between areas and boundary cues. Thanks to the recurrent cooperation mechanism between areas and boundaries, our PraNet is capable of calibrating any misaligned predictions, improving the segmentation accuracy. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations on five challenging datasets across six metrics show that our PraNet improves the segmentation accuracy significantly, and presents a number of advantages in terms of generalizability, and real-time segmentation efficiency.
We introduce a novel network, called CO-attention Siamese Network (COSNet), to address the unsupervised video object segmentation task from a holistic view. We emphasize the importance of inherent correlation among video frames and incorporate a global co-attention mechanism to improve further the state-of-the-art deep learning based solutions that primarily focus on learning discriminative foreground representations over appearance and motion in short-term temporal segments. The co-attention layers in our network provide efficient and competent stages for capturing global correlations and scene context by jointly computing and appending co-attention responses into a joint feature space. We train COSNet with pairs of video frames, which naturally augments training data and allows increased learning capacity. During the segmentation stage, the co-attention model encodes useful information by processing multiple reference frames together, which is leveraged to infer the frequently reappearing and salient foreground objects better. We propose a unified and end-to-end trainable framework where different co-attention variants can be derived for mining the rich context within videos. Our extensive experiments over three large benchmarks manifest that COSNet outperforms the current alternatives by a large margin.