# UCS: A Universal Model for Curvilinear Structure Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.04034 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04034/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 72 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Apr 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [V-Net: Fully Convolutional Neural Networks for Volumetric Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04797/) (2016)
- [UNet++: Redesigning Skip Connections to Exploit Multiscale Features in Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05074/) (2019)
- [Vision Transformer Adapter for Dense Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.08534/) (2022)
- [DenseCLIP: Language-Guided Dense Prediction with Context-Aware Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01518/) (2021)
- [GroupViT: Semantic Segmentation Emerges from Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.11094/) (2022)
- [Medical SAM Adapter: Adapting Segment Anything Model for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12620/) (2023)
- [Segment Anything in High Quality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01567/) (2023)
- [Mask DINO: Towards A Unified Transformer-based Framework for Object Detection and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02777/) (2022)
- [A Simple Framework for Open-Vocabulary Segmentation and Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08131/) (2023)
- [SAM-Med2D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16184/) (2023)
- [Dual Adversarial Network: Toward Real-world Noise Removal and Noise Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.05946/) (2020)
- [Efficient and Degradation-Adaptive Network for Real-World Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14216/) (2022)
- [Open-Vocabulary Instance Segmentation via Robust Cross-Modal Pseudo-Labeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12698/) (2021)
- [The Segment Anything Model (SAM) for Remote Sensing Applications: From Zero to One Shot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16623/) (2023)
- [Stronger, Fewer, & Superior: Harnessing Vision Foundation Models for Domain Generalized Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04265/) (2023)
- [Feature Pyramid and Hierarchical Boosting Network for Pavement Crack Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.06340/) (2019)
- [Aligning and Prompting Everything All at Once for Universal Visual Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02153/) (2023)
- [CS2-Net: Deep Learning Segmentation of Curvilinear Structures in Medical Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07486/) (2020)
- [OCTA-500: A Retinal Dataset for Optical Coherence Tomography Angiography Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07261/) (2020)
- [Learnable Prompting SAM-induced Knowledge Distillation for Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13742/) (2024)
- [GT U-Net: A U-Net Like Group Transformer Network for Tooth Root Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.14813/) (2021)
- [Deep Retinal Image Segmentation with Regularization Under Geometric Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.09175/) (2019)
- [Local Intensity Order Transformation for Robust Curvilinear Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.12587/) (2022)
- [An Accurate and Efficient Neural Network for OCTA Vessel Segmentation and a New Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.09483/) (2023)
- [Attention guided global enhancement and local refinement network for semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04363/) (2022)
- [DEQ-MPI: A Deep Equilibrium Reconstruction with Learned Consistency for Magnetic Particle Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.13233/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Curvilinear Structure-preserving Unpaired Cross-domain Medical Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.19679/) (2025)
- [From Reconstruction to Decision: A Post-Encoder Plug-in Adapter for Curvilinear Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.23486/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Curvilinear structure segmentation (CSS) is essential in various domains, including medical imaging, landscape analysis, industrial surface inspection, and plant analysis. While existing methods achieve high performance within specific domains, their generalizability is limited. On the other hand, large-scale models such as Segment Anything Model (SAM) exhibit strong generalization but are not optimized for curvilinear structures. Existing adaptations of SAM primarily focus on general object segmentation and lack specialized design for CSS tasks. To bridge this gap, we propose the Universal Curvilinear structure Segmentation (UCS) model, which adapts SAM to CSS tasks while further enhancing its cross-domain generalization. UCS features a novel encoder architecture integrating a pretrained SAM encoder with two innovations: a Sparse Adapter, strategically inserted to inherit the pre-trained SAM encoder's generalization capability while minimizing the number of fine-tuning parameters, and a Prompt Generation module, which leverages Fast Fourier Transform with a high-pass filter to generate curve-specific prompts. Furthermore, the UCS incorporates a mask decoder that eliminates reliance on manual interaction through a dual-compression module: a Hierarchical Feature Compression module, which aggregates the outputs of the sampled encoder to enhance detail preservation, and a Guidance Feature Compression module, which extracts and compresses image-driven guidance features. Evaluated on a comprehensive multi-domain dataset, including an in-house dataset covering eight natural curvilinear structures, UCS demonstrates state-of-the-art generalization and open-set segmentation performance across medical, engineering, natural, and plant imagery, establishing a new benchmark for universal CSS. The source code is available at https://github.com/kylechuuuuu/UCS.