GR‐Net: Gated axial attention ResNest network for polyp segmentation

Abstract Medical image segmentation is a key step in medical image analysis. The small differences in the background and foreground of medical images and the small size of most medical data sets make medical segmentation difficult. This paper uses a global‐local training strategy to train the network. In the global structure, ResNest is used as the backbone of the network, and parallel decoders are added to aggregate features, as well as gated axial attention to adapt to small datasets. In the local structure, the extraction of image details is accomplished by dividing the images into equal patches of the same size. To evaluate the performance of the model, qualitative and quantitative comparisons were performed on five datasets, Kvasir‐SEG, CVC‐ColonDB, CVC‐ClinicDB, CVC‐300, and ETIS‐LaribPolypDB, and the segmentation results were significantly better than the current mainstream polyp segmentation methods. The results show that the model has better segmentation performance and generalization ability.