Know your orientation: A viewpoint-aware framework for polyp segmentation

Automatic polyp segmentation in endoscopic images is critical for the early diagnosis of colorectal cancer. Despite the availability of powerful segmentation models, two challenges still impede the accuracy of polyp segmentation algorithms. Firstly, during a colonoscopy, physicians frequently adjust the orientation of the colonoscope tip to capture underlying lesions, resulting in viewpoint changes in the colonoscopy images. These variations increase the diversity of polyp visual appearance, posing a challenge for learning robust polyp features. Secondly, polyps often exhibit properties similar to the surrounding tissues, leading to indistinct polyp boundaries. To address these problems, we propose a viewpoint-aware framework named VANet for precise polyp segmentation. In VANet, polyps are emphasized as a discriminative feature and thus can be localized by class activation maps in a viewpoint classification process. With these polyp locations, we design a viewpoint-aware Transformer (VAFormer) to alleviate the erosion of attention by the surrounding tissues, thereby inducing better polyp representations. Additionally, to enhance the polyp boundary perception of the network, we develop a boundary-aware Transformer (BAFormer) to encourage self-attention towards uncertain regions. As a consequence, the combination of the two modules is capable of calibrating predictions and significantly improving polyp segmentation performance. Extensive experiments on seven public datasets across six metrics demonstrate the state-of-the-art results of our method, and VANet can handle colonoscopy images in real-world scenarios effectively. The source code is available at https://github.com/1024803482/ViewpointAware-Network.