Duplex Contextual Relation Network for Polyp Segmentation

Polyp segmentation is of great importance in the early diagnosis and treatment of colorectal cancer. Since polyps vary in their shape, size, color, and texture, accurate polyp segmentation is very challenging. One promising way to mitigate the diversity of polyps is to model the contextual relation for each pixel such as using attention mechanism. However, previous methods only focus on learning the dependencies between the position within an individual image and ignore the contextual relation across different images. In this paper, we propose Duplex Contextual Relation Network (DCRNet) to capture both within-image and cross-image contextual relations. Specifically, we first design Interior Contextual-Relation Module to estimate the similarity between each position and all the positions within the same image. Then Exterior Contextual-Relation Module is incorporated to estimate the similarity between each position and the positions across different images. Based on the above two types of similarity, the feature at one position can be further enhanced by the contextual region embedding within and across images. To store the characteristic region embedding from all the images, a memory bank is designed and operates as a queue. Therefore, the proposed method can relate similar features even though they come from different images. We evaluate the proposed method on the EndoScene, Kvasir-SEG and the recently released large-scale PICCOLO dataset. Experimental results show that the proposed DCRNet outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of the widely-used evaluation metrics.