轻量级插件提升细长结构分割的连通性,适配冻结编码器。
From Reconstruction to Decision: A Post-Encoder Plug-in Adapter for Curvilinear Segmentation

- 在编码器后插入可插拔模块,解决高分辨率特征恢复与二值化瓶颈。
- 在5个医学工业数据集上提升拓扑连通性(clDice),优于区域重叠(IoU)。
- 仅增加约0.26万参数,适合结构敏感型分割任务部署。
细长目标分割(如血管、裂纹)因空间稀疏性和拓扑脆弱性而困难,微小局部误差易导致结构断开。现有分割流水线依赖难以修改的强编码器,其深度下采样限制了精细结构恢复。本文聚焦编码器后阶段,分析两类可操作的失败模式:高分辨率特征重建瓶颈与二值化决策瓶颈。提出轻量级后编码器插件PEPA,结合目标条件蛇形上采样(TCSU)和目标自适应可微阈值(TADT),分别优化细长结构恢复与阈值预测。PEPA可接入提示式解码器与传统密集预测器。在五个医学与工业基准测试中,对冻结编码器基线添加PEPA后,拓扑连通性(clDice)提升显著超过区域重叠(IoU),表明结构连续性改善。仅引入约0.26M额外参数,为结构导向分割提供实用增强方案。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Curvilinear object segmentation, including vessels and cracks, is challenging due to extreme spatial sparsity and topological fragility, where small local errors can cause severe structural disconnections. Meanwhile, modern segmentation pipelines increasingly rely on strong but hard-to-modify foundation encoders whose heavy downsampling limits fine structural recovery. Motivated by this, we focus on the post-encoder stage and study two recurring and actionable failure modes: a reconstruction bottleneck in high-resolution feature restoration and a decision bottleneck in binarization. We present PEPA, a lightweight Post-Encoder Plug-in Adapter for 2D curvilinear segmentation pipelines with accessible decoder/head features and target, query, or class descriptors. PEPA couples (i) Target-Conditioned Snake Upsampling (TCSU), which uses target-conditioned continuous snake-like sampling to better recover thin and tortuous structures during upsampling, and (ii) Target-Adaptive Differentiable Thresholding (TADT), which predicts target-specific thresholds and optimizes a soft-threshold surrogate with explicit safeguards against trivial bias shifting. Under this post-encoder interface, PEPA can be attached to both prompt-based decoders and conventional dense predictors. Experiments on five medical and industrial benchmarks show that adding PEPA to frozen-encoder baselines yields consistent improvements, with gains in topological connectivity (clDice) typically exceeding those in region overlap (IoU), indicating improved structural continuity. With only $\sim$0.26M additional parameters, PEPA offers a practical post-encoder enhancement for structure-centric segmentation.
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