BMSNet: a boundary-guided multi-scale polyp segmentation network

Accurate polyp segmentation in colonoscopy images is essential for computer-aided diagnosis and early colorectal cancer screening. However, this task remains challenging due to large variations in polyp size, shape, and texture, as well as blurred boundaries and low contrast between polyps and surrounding mucosa. To address these challenges, we propose boundary-guided multi-scale polyp segmentation network (BMSNet), a boundary-guided multi-scale network for accurate polyp segmentation. First, an Scale-Aware Modulation Meets Transformer-T backbone initialized with officially released pretrained weights is adopted to extract multi-level features efficiently. Then, a boundary prediction module is introduced to generate preliminary boundary priors through bidirectional feature interaction and differentiable Canny-based auxiliary supervision. Based on the generated boundary information, we design a boundary-guided feature enhancement module to refine feature representations. This module combines frequency-domain enhancement, multi-scale feature interaction, and boundary-guided modulation. Finally, a feature fusion unit is introduced to progressively integrate multi-scale features and generate the final segmentation prediction. Extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. On ClinicDB, Kvasir, ColonDB, ETIS, and CVC-300, BMSNet achieves Dice scores of 0.943, 0.920, 0.828, 0.825, and 0.913, respectively. These results indicate that BMSNet achieves competitive segmentation performance with moderate computational complexity under the evaluated experimental setting.