LGPS: A Lightweight GAN-Based Approach for Polyp Segmentation in Colonoscopy Images

Colorectal cancer (CRC) is a major global cause of cancer-related deaths, with early polyp detection and removal during colonoscopy being crucial for prevention. While deep learning methods have shown promise in polyp segmentation, challenges such as high computational costs, difficulty in segmenting small or low-contrast polyps, and limited generalizability across datasets persist. To address these issues, we propose LGPS, a lightweight GAN-based framework for polyp segmentation. LGPS incorporates three key innovations: (1) a MobileNetV2 backbone enhanced with modified residual blocks and Squeeze-and-Excitation (ResE) modules for efficient feature extraction; (2) Convolutional Conditional Random Fields (ConvCRF) for precise boundary refinement; and (3) a hybrid loss function combining Binary Cross-Entropy, Weighted IoU Loss, and Dice Loss to address class imbalance and enhance segmentation accuracy. LGPS is validated on five benchmark datasets and compared with state-of-the-art(SOTA) methods. On the largest and challenging PolypGen test dataset, LGPS achieves a Dice of 0.7299 and an IoU of 0.7867, outperformed all SOTA works and demonstrating robust generalization. With only 1.07 million parameters, LGPS is 17 times smaller than the smallest existing model, making it highly suitable for real-time clinical applications. Its lightweight design and strong performance underscore its potential for improving early CRC diagnosis. Code is available at https://github.com/Falmi/LGPS/.