Prototype-Based Image Prompting for Weakly Supervised Histopathological Image Segmentation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Tang, Qingchen, Fan, Lei, Pagnucco, Maurice, Song, Yang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Tang, Qingchen
Fan, Lei
Pagnucco, Maurice
Song, Yang
author_facet Tang, Qingchen
Fan, Lei
Pagnucco, Maurice
Song, Yang
contents Weakly supervised image segmentation with image-level labels has drawn attention due to the high cost of pixel-level annotations. Traditional methods using Class Activation Maps (CAMs) often highlight only the most discriminative regions, leading to incomplete masks. Recent approaches that introduce textual information struggle with histopathological images due to inter-class homogeneity and intra-class heterogeneity. In this paper, we propose a prototype-based image prompting framework for histopathological image segmentation. It constructs an image bank from the training set using clustering, extracting multiple prototype features per class to capture intra-class heterogeneity. By designing a matching loss between input features and class-specific prototypes using contrastive learning, our method addresses inter-class homogeneity and guides the model to generate more accurate CAMs. Experiments on four datasets (LUAD-HistoSeg, BCSS-WSSS, GCSS, and BCSS) show that our method outperforms existing weakly supervised segmentation approaches, setting new benchmarks in histopathological image segmentation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_12068
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Prototype-Based Image Prompting for Weakly Supervised Histopathological Image Segmentation
Tang, Qingchen
Fan, Lei
Pagnucco, Maurice
Song, Yang
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Weakly supervised image segmentation with image-level labels has drawn attention due to the high cost of pixel-level annotations. Traditional methods using Class Activation Maps (CAMs) often highlight only the most discriminative regions, leading to incomplete masks. Recent approaches that introduce textual information struggle with histopathological images due to inter-class homogeneity and intra-class heterogeneity. In this paper, we propose a prototype-based image prompting framework for histopathological image segmentation. It constructs an image bank from the training set using clustering, extracting multiple prototype features per class to capture intra-class heterogeneity. By designing a matching loss between input features and class-specific prototypes using contrastive learning, our method addresses inter-class homogeneity and guides the model to generate more accurate CAMs. Experiments on four datasets (LUAD-HistoSeg, BCSS-WSSS, GCSS, and BCSS) show that our method outperforms existing weakly supervised segmentation approaches, setting new benchmarks in histopathological image segmentation.
title Prototype-Based Image Prompting for Weakly Supervised Histopathological Image Segmentation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.12068