TCCNet: Temporally Consistent Context-Free Network for Semi-supervised Video Polyp Segmentation

Automatic video polyp segmentation (VPS) is highly valued for the early diagnosis of colorectal cancer. However, existing methods are limited in three respects: 1) most of them work on static images, while ignoring the temporal information in consecutive video frames; 2) all of them are fully supervised and easily overfit in presence of limited annotations; 3) the context of polyp (i.e., lumen, specularity and mucosa tissue) varies in an endoscopic clip, which may affect the predictions of adjacent frames. To resolve these challenges, we propose a novel Temporally Consistent Context-Free Network (TCCNet) for semi-supervised VPS. It contains a segmentation branch and a propagation branch with a co-training scheme to supervise the predictions of unlabeled image. To maintain the temporal consistency of predictions, we design a Sequence-Corrected Reverse Attention module and a Propagation-Corrected Reverse Attention module. A Context-Free Loss is also proposed to mitigate the impact of varying contexts. Extensive experiments show that even trained under 1/15 label ratio, TCCNet is comparable to the state-of-the-art fully supervised methods for VPS. Also, TCCNet surpasses existing semi-supervised methods for natural image and other medical image segmentation tasks.