CBNet: Cooperation-Based Weakly Supervised Polyp Detection

Missed polyps are the major risk factor for colorectal cancer. To minimize misdiagnosis, many methods have been developed. However, they either rely on laborious instance-level annotations, require labeling of prompt points, or lack the ability to filter noise proposals and detect polyps integrally, resulting in severe challenges in this area. In this paper, we propose a novel Cooperation-Based network (CBNet), a two-stage polyp detection framework supervised by image labels that removes wrong proposals through classification in collaboration with segmentation and obtains a more accurate detector by aggregating adaptive multi-level regional features. Specifically, we conduct a Cooperation-Based Region Proposal Network (CBRPN) to reduce the negative impact of noises by deleting proposals without polyps, enabling our network to capture polyp features. Moreover, to enhance location integrity and classification precision of polyps, we aggregate multi-level region of interest (ROI) features under the guidance of the backbone classification layer, namely Adaptive ROI Fusion Module (ARFM). Extensive experiments on the public and private datasets show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance for weakly supervised methods and even outperforms full supervision in some terms. All code is available at https://github.com/dxqllp/CBNet.