# Double Encoder-Decoder Networks for Gastrointestinal Polyp Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.01939 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.01939/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Oct 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [Aggregated Residual Transformations for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05431/) (2016)
- [Rethinking Atrous Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05587/) (2017)
- [SegNet: A Deep Convolutional Encoder-Decoder Architecture for Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.00561/) (2015)
- [Kvasir-SEG: A Segmented Polyp Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.07069/) (2019)
- [UNet++: Redesigning Skip Connections to Exploit Multiscale Features in Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05074/) (2019)
- [PraNet: Parallel Reverse Attention Network for Polyp Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11392/) (2020)
- [A Benchmark for Endoluminal Scene Segmentation of Colonoscopy Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00799/) (2016)
- [ResUNet++: An Advanced Architecture for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.07067/) (2019)
- [DoubleU-Net: A Deep Convolutional Neural Network for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04868/) (2020)
- [Dual Path Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.01629/) (2017)
- [IterNet: Retinal Image Segmentation Utilizing Structural Redundancy in Vessel Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05763/) (2019)
- [Decoders Matter for Semantic Segmentation: Data-Dependent Decoding Enables Flexible Feature Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.02120/) (2019)
- [Polyp Segmentation in Colonoscopy Images Using Fully Convolutional Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.00368/) (2018)
- [The Devil is in the Decoder: Classification, Regression and GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.05847/) (2017)
- [Uncertainty and Interpretability in Convolutional Neural Networks for Semantic Segmentation of Colorectal Polyps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10584/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Assessing generalisability of deep learning-based polyp detection and segmentation methods through a computer vision challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.12031/) (2022)
- [FUSeg: The Foot Ulcer Segmentation Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.00414/) (2022)
- [On the Optimal Combination of Cross-Entropy and Soft Dice Losses for Lesion Segmentation with Out-of-Distribution Robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06078/) (2022)
- [Rethinking Decoder Design: Improving Biomarker Segmentation Using Depth-to-Space Restoration and Residual Linear Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.18335/) (2025)
- [Pixel-wise Modulated Dice Loss for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.15744/) (2025)
- [A Lightweight and Robust Framework for Real-Time Colorectal Polyp Detection Using LOF-Based Preprocessing and YOLO-v11n](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.10864/) (2025)
- [Polyp and Surgical Instrument Segmentation with Double Encoder-Decoder Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03901/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Polyps represent an early sign of the development of Colorectal Cancer. The standard procedure for their detection consists of colonoscopic examination of the gastrointestinal tract. However, the wide range of polyp shapes and visual appearances, as well as the reduced quality of this image modality, turn their automatic identification and segmentation with computational tools into a challenging computer vision task. In this work, we present a new strategy for the delineation of gastrointestinal polyps from endoscopic images based on a direct extension of common encoder-decoder networks for semantic segmentation. In our approach, two pretrained encoder-decoder networks are sequentially stacked: the second network takes as input the concatenation of the original frame and the initial prediction generated by the first network, which acts as an attention mechanism enabling the second network to focus on interesting areas within the image, thereby improving the quality of its predictions. Quantitative evaluation carried out on several polyp segmentation databases shows that double encoder-decoder networks clearly outperform their single encoder-decoder counterparts in all cases. In addition, our best double encoder-decoder combination attains excellent segmentation accuracy and reaches state-of-the-art performance results in all the considered datasets, with a remarkable boost of accuracy on images extracted from datasets not used for training.