FuzzyNet: A Fuzzy Attention Module for Polyp Segmentation

Polyp segmentation is essential for accelerating the diagnosis of colon cancer. However, it is challenging because of the diverse color, texture, and varying lighting effects of the polyps as well as the subtle difference between the polyp and its surrounding area. To further increase the performance of polyp segmentation, we propose to focus more on the problematic pixels that are harder to predict. To this end, we propose a novel attention module named Fuzzy Attention to focus more on the difficult pixels. Our attention module generates a high attention score for fuzzy pixels usually located near the boundary region. This module can be embedded in any convolution neural network-based backbone network. We embed our module with various backbone networks: Res2Net, ConvNext and Pyramid Vision Transformer and evaluate the models on five polyp segmentation datasets: Kvasir, CVC-300, CVC-ColonDB, CVC-ClinicDB, and ETIS. Our attention module with Res2Net as the backbone network outperforms the reverse attention-based PraNet by a significant amount on all datasets. In addition, our module with PVT as the backbone network achieves state-of-the-art accuracy of 0.937, 0.811, and 0.791 on the CVC-ClinicDB, CVC-ColonDB, and ETIS, respectively, outperforming the latest SA-Net, TransFuse and Polyp-PVT.