Edge-aware Feature Aggregation Network for Polyp Segmentation
Tao Zhou Yizhe Zhang Geng Chen Yi Zhou Ye Wu Deng-Ping Fan
Precise polyp segmentation is vital for the early diagnosis and prevention of
colorectal cancer (CRC) in clinical practice. However, due to scale variation
and blurry polyp boundaries, it is still a challenging task to achieve
satisfactory segmentation performance with different scales and shapes. In this
study, we present a novel Edge-aware Feature Aggregation Network (EFA-Net) for
polyp segmentation, which can fully make use of cross-level and multi-scale
features to enhance the performance of polyp segmentation. Specifically, we
first present an Edge-aware Guidance Module (EGM) to combine the low-level
features with the high-level features to learn an edge-enhanced feature, which
is incorporated into each decoder unit using a layer-by-layer strategy.
Besides, a Scale-aware Convolution Module (SCM) is proposed to learn
scale-aware features by using dilated convolutions with different ratios, in
order to effectively deal with scale variation. Further, a Cross-level Fusion
Module (CFM) is proposed to effectively integrate the cross-level features,
which can exploit the local and global contextual information. Finally, the
outputs of CFMs are adaptively weighted by using the learned edge-aware
feature, which are then used to produce multiple side-out segmentation maps.
Experimental results on five widely adopted colonoscopy datasets show that our
EFA-Net outperforms state-of-the-art polyp segmentation methods in terms of
generalization and effectiveness.