Unleashing Fine-Coarse Curve Perception Via Trunk-Branch Perturbation

Segmenting intricate curve structures like retinal blood vessels, encompassing both fine and coarse details, remains a significant challenge. This work proposes a novel module that divides these complex curve structures into trunks and branches, fuses the input as auxiliary information, and optimizes the breakpoints of different curve parts through losses. In order to balance the redundant information that may lead to model overfitting, a unique feature perturbation strategy is introduced after the backbone decoding process to enhance the model’s robustness to complex curve structure segmentation tasks. Experiments show that this method can effectively distinguish different topological structures of blood vessels and maintain high segmentation accuracy even at blood vessel intersections or breakpoints, which holds immense potential for diverse future applications in image segmentation.