M^2UNet: MetaFormer Multi-scale Upsampling Network for Polyp Segmentation

TL;DR

M^2UNet is a novel polyp segmentation network that combines MetaFormer, CNN, and Transformer elements with multi-scale upsampling to improve feature aggregation and segmentation accuracy.

Contribution

The paper introduces M^2UNet, integrating MetaFormer with a multi-scale upsampling block within a UNet framework for enhanced polyp segmentation.

Findings

Achieved competitive results on five benchmark datasets.

Effectively exploits multi-level features for better segmentation.

Demonstrates the benefit of combining CNN and Transformer features.

Abstract

Polyp segmentation has recently garnered significant attention, and multiple methods have been formulated to achieve commendable outcomes. However, these techniques often confront difficulty when working with the complex polyp foreground and their surrounding regions because of the nature of convolution operation. Besides, most existing methods forget to exploit the potential information from multiple decoder stages. To address this challenge, we suggest combining MetaFormer, introduced as a baseline for integrating CNN and Transformer, with UNet framework and incorporating our Multi-scale Upsampling block (MU). This simple module makes it possible to combine multi-level information by exploring multiple receptive field paths of the shallow decoder stage and then adding with the higher stage to aggregate better feature representation, which is essential in medical image segmentation. Taken all together, we propose MetaFormer Multi-scale Upsampling Network (M$^2$UNet) for the polyp segmentation task. Extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method achieved competitive performance compared with several previous methods.