# FLDNet: A Foreground-Aware Network for Polyp Segmentation Leveraging Long-Distance Dependencies

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.05987 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.05987/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Sep 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12122/) (2021)
- [UNet++: A Nested U-Net Architecture for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10165/) (2018)
- [Do Vision Transformers See Like Convolutional Neural Networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08810/) (2021)
- [Structure-measure: A New Way to Evaluate Foreground Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.00786/) (2017)
- [PraNet: Parallel Reverse Attention Network for Polyp Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11392/) (2020)
- [Intriguing Properties of Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.10497/) (2021)
- [Enhanced-alignment Measure for Binary Foreground Map Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.10421/) (2018)
- [Transformers in Medical Imaging: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09873/) (2022)
- [Cascaded Partial Decoder for Fast and Accurate Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08739/) (2019)
- [ResUNet++: An Advanced Architecture for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.07067/) (2019)
- [F3Net: Fusion, Feedback and Focus for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11445/) (2019)
- [Reverse Attention for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.09940/) (2018)
- [Shallow Attention Network for Polyp Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.00882/) (2021)
- [HarDNet-MSEG: A Simple Encoder-Decoder Polyp Segmentation Neural Network that Achieves over 0.9 Mean Dice and 86 FPS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.07172/) (2021)
- [UACANet: Uncertainty Augmented Context Attention for Polyp Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.02368/) (2021)
- [Stepwise Feature Fusion: Local Guides Global](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03635/) (2022)
- [Adaptive Context Selection for Polyp Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.04799/) (2023)
- [Enhanced U-Net: A Feature Enhancement Network for Polyp Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.00999/) (2021)
- [Automated polyp detection in colon capsule endoscopy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1305.1912/) (2013)
- [Psi-Net: Shape and boundary aware joint multi-task deep network for medical image segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.04099/) (2019)
- [Duplex Contextual Relation Network for Polyp Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06725/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Given the close association between colorectal cancer and polyps, the diagnosis and identification of colorectal polyps play a critical role in the detection and surgical intervention of colorectal cancer. In this context, the automatic detection and segmentation of polyps from various colonoscopy images has emerged as a significant problem that has attracted broad attention. Current polyp segmentation techniques face several challenges: firstly, polyps vary in size, texture, color, and pattern; secondly, the boundaries between polyps and mucosa are usually blurred, existing studies have focused on learning the local features of polyps while ignoring the long-range dependencies of the features, and also ignoring the local context and global contextual information of the combined features. To address these challenges, we propose FLDNet (Foreground-Long-Distance Network), a Transformer-based neural network that captures long-distance dependencies for accurate polyp segmentation. Specifically, the proposed model consists of three main modules: a pyramid-based Transformer encoder, a local context module, and a foreground-Aware module. Multilevel features with long-distance dependency information are first captured by the pyramid-based transformer encoder. On the high-level features, the local context module obtains the local characteristics related to the polyps by constructing different local context information. The coarse map obtained by decoding the reconstructed highest-level features guides the feature fusion process in the foreground-Aware module of the high-level features to achieve foreground enhancement of the polyps. Our proposed method, FLDNet, was evaluated using seven metrics on common datasets and demonstrated superiority over state-of-the-art methods on widely-used evaluation measures.