# CL-Polyp: A Contrastive Learning-Enhanced Network for Accurate Polyp Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.07154 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.07154/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 28 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [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)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [Exploring Simple Siamese Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10566/) (2020)
- [FaceNet: A Unified Embedding for Face Recognition and Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03832/) (2015)
- [Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12122/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Res2Net: A New Multi-scale Backbone Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01169/) (2019)
- [PraNet: Parallel Reverse Attention Network for Polyp Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11392/) (2020)
- [nnU-Net: Self-adapting Framework for U-Net-Based Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.10486/) (2018)
- [TransFuse: Fusing Transformers and CNNs for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.08005/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Polyp-PVT: Polyp Segmentation with Pyramid Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06932/) (2021)
- [Shallow Attention Network for Polyp Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.00882/) (2021)
- [Automatic Polyp Segmentation via Multi-scale Subtraction Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05082/) (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)
- [TGANet: Text-guided attention for improved polyp segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.04280/) (2022)
- [CaraNet: Context Axial Reverse Attention Network for Segmentation of Small Medical Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13366/) (2023)
- [Lesion-aware Dynamic Kernel for Polyp Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.04904/) (2023)
- [Psi-Net: Shape and boundary aware joint multi-task deep network for medical image segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.04099/) (2019)
- [BoxPolyp:Boost Generalized Polyp Segmentation Using Extra Coarse Bounding Box Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03498/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Accurate segmentation of polyps from colonoscopy images is crucial for the early diagnosis and treatment of colorectal cancer. Most existing deep learning-based polyp segmentation methods adopt an Encoder-Decoder architecture, and some utilize multi-task frameworks that incorporate auxiliary tasks like classification to improve segmentation. However, these methods often need more labeled data and depend on task similarity, potentially limiting generalizability. To address these challenges, we propose CL-Polyp, a contrastive learning-enhanced polyp segmentation network. Our method uses contrastive learning to enhance the encoder's extraction of discriminative features by contrasting positive and negative sample pairs from polyp images. This self-supervised strategy improves visual representation without needing additional annotations. We also introduce two efficient, lightweight modules: the Modified Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling (MASPP) module for improved multi-scale feature fusion, and the Channel Concatenate and Element Add (CA) module to merge low-level and upsampled features for {enhanced} boundary reconstruction. Extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets-Kvasir-SEG, CVC-ClinicDB, CVC-ColonDB, CVC-300, and ETIS-show that CL-Polyp consistently surpasses state-of-the-art methods. Specifically, it enhances the IoU metric by 0.011 and 0.020 on the Kvasir-SEG and CVC-ClinicDB datasets, respectively, demonstrating its effectiveness in clinical polyp segmentation.