# ECC-PolypDet: Enhanced CenterNet with Contrastive Learning for Automatic Polyp Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.04961 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04961/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Jan 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11362/) (2020)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [MMDetection: Open MMLab Detection Toolbox and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07155/) (2019)
- [DINO: DETR with Improved DeNoising Anchor Boxes for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03605/) (2022)
- [Cascade R-CNN: Delving into High Quality Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00726/) (2017)
- [Objects as Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07850/) (2019)
- [YOLOX: Exceeding YOLO Series in 2021](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08430/) (2021)
- [PVT v2: Improved Baselines with Pyramid Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13797/) (2021)
- [Sparse R-CNN: End-to-End Object Detection with Learnable Proposals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12450/) (2020)
- [Exploring Cross-Image Pixel Contrast for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11939/) (2021)
- [Semantic Flow for Fast and Accurate Scene Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10120/) (2020)
- [Video Polyp Segmentation: A Deep Learning Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14291/) (2022)
- [A multi-centre polyp detection and segmentation dataset for generalisability assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04463/) (2021)
- [Multi-frame Collaboration for Effective Endoscopic Video Polyp Detection via Spatial-Temporal Feature Transformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03609/) (2021)
- [SSL-CPCD: Self-supervised learning with composite pretext-class discrimination for improved generalisability in endoscopic image analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00197/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Let Video Teaches You More: Video-to-Image Knowledge Distillation using DEtection TRansformer for Medical Video Lesion Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.14051/) (2024)
- [HGNet: High-Order Spatial Awareness Hypergraph and Multi-Scale Context Attention Network for Colorectal Polyp Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.04880/) (2025)
- [AVPDN: Learning Motion-Robust and Scale-Adaptive Representations for Video-Based Polyp Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03458/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Accurate polyp detection is critical for early colorectal cancer diagnosis. Although remarkable progress has been achieved in recent years, the complex colon environment and concealed polyps with unclear boundaries still pose severe challenges in this area. Existing methods either involve computationally expensive context aggregation or lack prior modeling of polyps, resulting in poor performance in challenging cases. In this paper, we propose the Enhanced CenterNet with Contrastive Learning (ECC-PolypDet), a two-stage training & end-to-end inference framework that leverages images and bounding box annotations to train a general model and fine-tune it based on the inference score to obtain a final robust model. Specifically, we conduct Box-assisted Contrastive Learning (BCL) during training to minimize the intra-class difference and maximize the inter-class difference between foreground polyps and backgrounds, enabling our model to capture concealed polyps. Moreover, to enhance the recognition of small polyps, we design the Semantic Flow-guided Feature Pyramid Network (SFFPN) to aggregate multi-scale features and the Heatmap Propagation (HP) module to boost the model's attention on polyp targets. In the fine-tuning stage, we introduce the IoU-guided Sample Re-weighting (ISR) mechanism to prioritize hard samples by adaptively adjusting the loss weight for each sample during fine-tuning. Extensive experiments on six large-scale colonoscopy datasets demonstrate the superiority of our model compared with previous state-of-the-art detectors.
