Controlling False Positives in Image Segmentation via Conformal Prediction

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Hauptverfasser: Mossina, Luca, Friedrich, Corentin
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Mossina, Luca
Friedrich, Corentin
author_facet Mossina, Luca
Friedrich, Corentin
contents Reliable semantic segmentation is essential for clinical decision making, yet deep models rarely provide explicit statistical guarantees on their errors. We introduce a simple post-hoc framework that constructs confidence masks with distribution-free, image-level control of false-positive predictions. Given any pretrained segmentation model, we define a nested family of shrunken masks obtained either by increasing the score threshold or by applying morphological erosion. A labeled calibration set is used to select a single shrink parameter via conformal prediction, ensuring that, for new images that are exchangeable with the calibration data, the proportion of false positives retained in the confidence mask stays below a user-specified tolerance with high probability. The method is model-agnostic, requires no retraining, and provides finite-sample guarantees regardless of the underlying predictor. Experiments on a polyp-segmentation benchmark demonstrate target-level empirical validity. Our framework enables practical, risk-aware segmentation in settings where over-segmentation can have clinical consequences. Code at https://github.com/deel-ai-papers/conseco.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_15406
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Controlling False Positives in Image Segmentation via Conformal Prediction
Mossina, Luca
Friedrich, Corentin
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Reliable semantic segmentation is essential for clinical decision making, yet deep models rarely provide explicit statistical guarantees on their errors. We introduce a simple post-hoc framework that constructs confidence masks with distribution-free, image-level control of false-positive predictions. Given any pretrained segmentation model, we define a nested family of shrunken masks obtained either by increasing the score threshold or by applying morphological erosion. A labeled calibration set is used to select a single shrink parameter via conformal prediction, ensuring that, for new images that are exchangeable with the calibration data, the proportion of false positives retained in the confidence mask stays below a user-specified tolerance with high probability. The method is model-agnostic, requires no retraining, and provides finite-sample guarantees regardless of the underlying predictor. Experiments on a polyp-segmentation benchmark demonstrate target-level empirical validity. Our framework enables practical, risk-aware segmentation in settings where over-segmentation can have clinical consequences. Code at https://github.com/deel-ai-papers/conseco.
title Controlling False Positives in Image Segmentation via Conformal Prediction
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.15406