PPNet: Pyramid pooling based network for polyp segmentation

Colonoscopy is the gold standard method for investigating the gastrointestinal tract. Localizing the polyps in colonoscopy images plays a vital role when doing a colonoscopy screening, and it is also quite important for the following treatment, e.g., polyp resection. Many deep learning-based methods have been applied for solving the polyp segmentation issue. However, precisely polyp segmentation is still an open issue. Considering the effectiveness of the Pyramid Pooling Transformer (P2T) in modeling long-range dependencies and capturing robust contextual features, as well as the power of pyramid pooling in extracting features, we propose a pyramid pooling based network for polyp segmentation, namely PPNet. We first adopt the P2T as the encoder for extracting more powerful features. Next, a pyramid feature fusion module (PFFM) combining the channel attention scheme is utilized for learning a global contextual feature, in order to guide the information transition in the decoder branch. Aiming to enhance the effectiveness of PPNet on feature extraction during the decoder stage layer by layer, we introduce the memory-keeping pyramid pooling module (MPPM) into each side branch of the encoder, and transmit the corresponding feature to each lower-level side branch. Experimental results conducted on five public colorectal polyp segmentation datasets are given and discussed. Our method performs better compared with several state-of-the-art polyp extraction networks, which demonstrate the effectiveness of the mechanism of pyramid pooling for colorectal polyp segmentation.