arXiv:2607.07123cs.CVcs.SY2026-07

解决细长结构分割中连通性断裂问题,让模型聚焦关键瓶颈像素。

Widest-Path Reachability Fields for Connectivity-Preserving Slender Structure Segmentation

论文配图:Widest-Path Reachability Fields for Connectivity-Preserving Slender Structure Segmentation
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 设计可微最大-最小可达性损失,引导梯度聚焦连通瓶颈。
  • 在6个数据集上提升连通性指标7.2个百分点,87%实验效果更好。
  • 适用于血管、裂纹等细长结构,尤其适合对拓扑正确性要求高的场景。

分割视网膜血管、裂缝、道路等细长曲线结构需保证拓扑正确性,单像素断连即会导致连续网络失效并影响下游分析。标准二值掩码监督下,以像素重叠优化的模型常产生拓扑断裂预测。我们发现其根源在于:像素级损失均匀分配梯度,而连通性依赖稀疏的瓶颈像素,这些像素数量远少于主体与背景,导致其梯度贡献可忽略。此现象称为拓扑梯度饥饿(TGS)。为此,我们提出广径路可达性场(WPRF),一种可微分的极大极小可达性目标,通过动态规划在受限图上实现,并引入瓶颈感知观测项平衡不同结构的梯度贡献。相比依赖后处理骨架化或同调计算的拓扑感知损失,WPRF直接通过可微极大极小代数端到端优化可达性,使梯度集中于连通瓶颈,无需额外结构。我们引入新的口腔微血管分割数据集OMVIS。九种架构、六个数据集上的实验验证了该机制的有效性:固定超参数下,87%的实验性能提升,在结构脆弱数据集上达到clDice提升7.2个百分点。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Segmenting slender curvilinear structures such as retinal vessels, cracks, and roads demands topological correctness, as even a single-pixel discontinuity can fragment a continuous network and invalidate downstream analysis. Under standard binary-mask supervision, models optimized for pixel-level overlap frequently produce topologically broken predictions. We trace this to a fundamental mismatch: pixel-wise losses distribute gradients uniformly, yet connectivity hinges on a sparse set of bottleneck pixels. These pixels are vastly outnumbered by thick structures and background, rendering their aggregate gradient contribution negligible. We term this phenomenon topological gradient starvation (TGS). To address it, we propose Widest-Path Reachability Fields (WPRF), a differentiable Max-Min reachability objective that redirects gradient flow to connectivity bottlenecks. The module is plug-and-play, backbone-agnostic, and incurs no inference overhead. WPRF implements a differentiable Max-Min objective via dynamic programming on a domain-restricted graph, coupled with a bottleneck-aware observation term that balances gradient contributions across varying structures. Compared to prior topology-aware losses that rely on post-hoc skeletonization or homology computation, WPRF directly optimizes end-to-end reachability via differentiable Max-Min algebra, enabling gradient flow to concentrate on connectivity bottlenecks without auxiliary structures. We introduce OMVIS, a new oral microvessel segmentation dataset. Experiments across nine architectures and six datasets validate the bottleneck-focused gradient routing mechanism. WPRF improves 87\% of experiments with fixed hyperparameters and achieves clDice gains of 7.2 percentage points on structurally fragile datasets.

图像分割连通性医学影像可微分

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