A novel non-pretrained deep supervision network for polyp segmentation

In this paper, we propose a non-pretrained deep supervision network (NPD-Net) for polyp segmentation. Unlike previous deep supervision networks that rely on ground truth (GT) or pre-training with GT to supervise deep features(the prediction maps from decoder), we propose a novel deep supervision strategy that directly utilizes the GT encoder (that encodes GT to get its maps) after initialization to mitigate overfitting and enhance generalization ability without pre-training, in other words, a non-pretrained. This strategy makes up the gap of directly using GT for deep supervision while mitigates the risk of overfitting due to leverage the well-train pre-trained weights on a small polyp datasets. In addition, we introduce a simple and efficient parallel dual attention module (PDA) to enhance the global modeling ability. PDA executes spatial and channel attention in parallel, and adopts implicit positional encoding and transpose operation to reduce computational complexity. Finally, NPD-Net is able to effectively supervise deep features, expand the range of context information acquisition and improve segmentation performance, particularly in terms of generalization ability. Our experimental results on five benchmark datasets demonstrate that NPD-Net outperforms other state-of-the-art methods.