# BARNet: Bilinear Attention Network with Adaptive Receptive Fields for Surgical Instrument Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.07093 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07093/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 20 Jan 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [FUN-SIS: a Fully UNsupervised approach for Surgical Instrument Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.08141/) (2022)
- [Methods and datasets for segmentation of minimally invasive surgical instruments in endoscopic images and videos: A review of the state of the art](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13014/) (2023)
- [NanoNet: Real-Time Polyp Segmentation in Video Capsule Endoscopy and Colonoscopy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11138/) (2021)
- [LensID: A CNN-RNN-Based Framework Towards Lens Irregularity Detection in Cataract Surgery Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00875/) (2021)
- [ReCal-Net: Joint Region-Channel-Wise Calibrated Network for Semantic Segmentation in Cataract Surgery Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.12448/) (2021)
- [Surgical Scene Understanding in the Era of Foundation AI Models: A Comprehensive Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14886/) (2025)
- [DeepPyramid: Enabling Pyramid View and Deformable Pyramid Reception for Semantic Segmentation in Cataract Surgery Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01453/) (2022)
- [RetiFluidNet: A Self-Adaptive and Multi-Attention Deep Convolutional Network for Retinal OCT Fluid Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.12468/) (2022)
- ["Train one, Classify one, Teach one" -- Cross-surgery transfer learning for surgical step recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12308/) (2021)
- [A comprehensive survey on recent deep learning-based methods applied to surgical data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.01435/) (2022)
- [LGPS: A Lightweight GAN-Based Approach for Polyp Segmentation in Colonoscopy Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18294/) (2025)
- [Single-stage Multi-human Parsing via Point Sets and Center-based Offsets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11356/) (2023)
- [DeepPyram: Enabling Pyramid View and Deformable Pyramid Reception for Semantic Segmentation in Cataract Surgery Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05352/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Surgical instrument segmentation is extremely important for computer-assisted surgery. Different from common object segmentation, it is more challenging due to the large illumination and scale variation caused by the special surgical scenes. In this paper, we propose a novel bilinear attention network with adaptive receptive field to solve these two challenges. For the illumination variation, the bilinear attention module can capture second-order statistics to encode global contexts and semantic dependencies between local pixels. With them, semantic features in challenging areas can be inferred from their neighbors and the distinction of various semantics can be boosted. For the scale variation, our adaptive receptive field module aggregates multi-scale features and automatically fuses them with different weights. Specifically, it encodes the semantic relationship between channels to emphasize feature maps with appropriate scales, changing the receptive field of subsequent convolutions. The proposed network achieves the best performance 97.47% mean IOU on Cata7 and comes first place on EndoVis 2017 by 10.10% IOU overtaking second-ranking method.