# Graph-based Pyramid Global Context Reasoning with a Saliency-aware Projection for COVID-19 Lung Infections Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.04235 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04235/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Mar 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Pyramid Scene Parsing Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01105/) (2016)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [UNet++: A Nested U-Net Architecture for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10165/) (2018)
- [Dual Attention Network for Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02983/) (2018)
- [UNet 3+: A Full-Scale Connected UNet for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.08790/) (2020)
- [Inf-Net: Automatic COVID-19 Lung Infection Segmentation from CT Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14133/) (2020)
- [Referring Image Segmentation via Cross-Modal Progressive Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.00514/) (2020)
- [Graph-Based Global Reasoning Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12814/) (2018)
- [Review of Artificial Intelligence Techniques in Imaging Data Acquisition, Segmentation and Diagnosis for COVID-19](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02731/) (2020)
- [Dual Graph Convolutional Network for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.06121/) (2019)
- [Deep Vessel Segmentation By Learning Graphical Connectivity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.02279/) (2018)
- [Domain-adversarial neural networks to address the appearance variability of histopathology images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06183/) (2017)
- [Edge-aware Graph Representation Learning and Reasoning for Face Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11240/) (2020)
- [Residual Attention U-Net for Automated Multi-Class Segmentation of COVID-19 Chest CT Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05645/) (2020)
- [GINet: Graph Interaction Network for Scene Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.06160/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [SwinNet: Swin Transformer drives edge-aware RGB-D and RGB-T salient object detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05585/) (2022)
- [HRTransNet: HRFormer-Driven Two-Modality Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.03036/) (2023)
- [Self-Knowledge Distillation based Self-Supervised Learning for Covid-19 Detection from Chest X-Ray Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.03009/) (2022)
- [U-GAT: Multimodal Graph Attention Network for COVID-19 Outcome Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.00860/) (2021)
- [HSOD-BIT-V2: A New Challenging Benchmarkfor Hyperspectral Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13906/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) has rapidly spread in 2020, emerging a mass of studies for lung infection segmentation from CT images. Though many methods have been proposed for this issue, it is a challenging task because of infections of various size appearing in different lobe zones. To tackle these issues, we propose a Graph-based Pyramid Global Context Reasoning (Graph-PGCR) module, which is capable of modeling long-range dependencies among disjoint infections as well as adapt size variation. We first incorporate graph convolution to exploit long-term contextual information from multiple lobe zones. Different from previous average pooling or maximum object probability, we propose a saliency-aware projection mechanism to pick up infection-related pixels as a set of graph nodes. After graph reasoning, the relation-aware features are reversed back to the original coordinate space for the down-stream tasks. We further construct multiple graphs with different sampling rates to handle the size variation problem. To this end, distinct multi-scale long-range contextual patterns can be captured. Our Graph-PGCR module is plug-and-play, which can be integrated into any architecture to improve its performance. Experiments demonstrated that the proposed method consistently boost the performance of state-of-the-art backbone architectures on both of public and our private COVID-19 datasets.