Rethinking Polyp Segmentation from the Perspectives of Matching Views and Seeking Camouflage

Zhengfang Jiang, Haipeng Chen, Yongping Yang, Xianzhu Liu, Yingda Lyu

Abstract: Accurate segmentation of polyps from colonoscopy images is of great significance for the prevention of colorectal cancer. Despite notable progress, polyp segmentation remains a challenging task due to the diversity of polyp size and shape, as well as the camouflage property of polyps caused by their high similarity to surrounding tissues. To address these challenges, inspired by human perceptual experience in finding objects, we propose a multi-perspective collaborative network (MPCNet), innovatively identifying the potential polyps from the perspectives of matching views and seeking camouflage. Firstly, from the former perspective, a global–local aware module is proposed to provide various feature receptive fields to match suitable views for polyps of different sizes and shapes. Then, from the latter perspective, a texture enhancement module (TEM) and an interaction refinement module (IRM) are proposed to mine and complement clues essential for breaking the camouflage. Specifically, TEM mines texture-related clues and amplifies the subtle texture differences between polyps and their background, while IRM complements boundary clues and further optimizes feature representation through the interaction between boundaries and regions, thereby generating accurate segmentation results with complete regions and fine boundaries. Extensive experiments on five benchmark polyp datasets show that our MPCNet outperforms other state-of-the-art methods. In particular, we achieve a mean Dice of 81.7% and 82.4% on the most challenging datasets CVC-ColonDB and ETIS, respectively, which are significantly higher than competing methods.

External IDs:dblp:journals/mms/JiangCYLL25