Task-Aware Active Learning for Endoscopic Polyp Segmentation

Pranav Poudel, Shrawan Kumar Thapa, Sudarshan Regmi, Binod Bhattarai, Danail Stoyanov

Abstract: Semantic segmentation of polyps is one of the most important research problems in endoscopic image analysis. One of the main obstacles to researching such a problem is the lack of annotated data. Endoscopic annotations necessitate the specialist knowledge of expert endoscopists, and hence the difficulty of organizing arises along with tremendous costs in time and budget. To address this problem, we investigate an active learning paradigm to reduce the requirement of massive labelled training examples by selecting the most discriminative and diverse unlabeled examples for the task taken into consideration. To this end, we propose a task-aware active learning pipeline that considers not only the uncertainty that the current task model exhibits for a given unlabelled example but also the diversity in the composition of the acquired pool in the feature space of the model. We compare our method with the competitive baselines on two publicly available polyps segmentation benchmark datasets. We observe a significant performance improvement over the compared baselines from the experimental results. The code and implementation details are available at: https://github.com/bhattarailab/endo-active-learn