# Inf-Net: Automatic COVID-19 Lung Infection Segmentation from CT Images

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.14133 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14133/

## Key facts

- Cited by 184 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 22 Apr 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 184)

- [Efficient Test-Time Model Adaptation without Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02610/) (2022)
- [Concealed Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.10274/) (2021)
- [Simultaneously Localize, Segment and Rank the Camouflaged Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04011/) (2021)
- [Camouflaged Object Segmentation with Distraction Mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10475/) (2021)
- [Zoom In and Out: A Mixed-scale Triplet Network for Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02688/) (2022)
- [Recent advances and clinical applications of deep learning in medical image analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.13381/) (2021)
- [Mutual Graph Learning for Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02613/) (2021)
- [Can SAM Segment Anything? When SAM Meets Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04709/) (2023)
- [High-resolution Iterative Feedback Network for Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11624/) (2022)
- [SAM Struggles in Concealed Scenes -- Empirical Study on Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06022/) (2023)
- [Deep Gradient Learning for Efficient Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12853/) (2022)
- [ZoomNeXt: A Unified Collaborative Pyramid Network for Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.20208/) (2023)
- [Advances in Deep Concealed Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11234/) (2023)
- [Frequency-Spatial Entanglement Learning for Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.01686/) (2024)
- [Local contrastive loss with pseudo-label based self-training for semi-supervised medical image segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09645/) (2021)
- [Weakly-Supervised Camouflaged Object Detection with Scribble Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.14083/) (2022)
- [Rethinking Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation: A Variance-Reduction Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.01735/) (2023)
- [Fast Camouflaged Object Detection via Edge-based Reversible Re-calibration Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.03216/) (2021)
- [Feature Aggregation and Propagation Network for Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00990/) (2022)
- [Frequency Perception Network for Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08924/) (2023)
- [A Survey of Camouflaged Object Detection and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.14562/) (2024)
- [Deep Texture-Aware Features for Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02996/) (2021)
- [Ariadne's Thread:Using Text Prompts to Improve Segmentation of Infected Areas from Chest X-ray images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03942/) (2023)
- [Camouflaged Object Detection via Context-aware Cross-level Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.13362/) (2022)
- [OSFormer: One-Stage Camouflaged Instance Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02255/) (2022)
- [Mine yOur owN Anatomy: Revisiting Medical Image Segmentation with Extremely Limited Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13476/) (2022)
- [Diffusion Model for Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00303/) (2023)
- [Modality-agnostic Domain Generalizable Medical Image Segmentation by Multi-Frequency in Multi-Scale Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.06284/) (2024)
- [Boosting Camouflaged Object Detection with Dual-Task Interactive Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10579/) (2022)
- [Octopus: Alleviating Hallucination via Dynamic Contrastive Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.00361/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) spread globally in early 2020, causing the world to face an existential health crisis. Automated detection of lung infections from computed tomography (CT) images offers a great potential to augment the traditional healthcare strategy for tackling COVID-19. However, segmenting infected regions from CT slices faces several challenges, including high variation in infection characteristics, and low intensity contrast between infections and normal tissues. Further, collecting a large amount of data is impractical within a short time period, inhibiting the training of a deep model. To address these challenges, a novel COVID-19 Lung Infection Segmentation Deep Network (Inf-Net) is proposed to automatically identify infected regions from chest CT slices. In our Inf-Net, a parallel partial decoder is used to aggregate the high-level features and generate a global map. Then, the implicit reverse attention and explicit edge-attention are utilized to model the boundaries and enhance the representations. Moreover, to alleviate the shortage of labeled data, we present a semi-supervised segmentation framework based on a randomly selected propagation strategy, which only requires a few labeled images and leverages primarily unlabeled data. Our semi-supervised framework can improve the learning ability and achieve a higher performance. Extensive experiments on our COVID-SemiSeg and real CT volumes demonstrate that the proposed Inf-Net outperforms most cutting-edge segmentation models and advances the state-of-the-art performance.