VPSentry: Semi-supervised Video Polyp Segmentation via Sentry-guided Long-term Prototype Fusion with Correlation Dynamic Propagation

Automated polyp segmentation in colonoscopy videos is an essential computer-aided technology for early detection and removal of polyps. However, most video polyp segmentation methods are designed with pixel-level temporal learning mechanisms, at the cost of time-consuming frame-wise annotations. In this paper, we present VPSentry, a novel semi-supervised segmentation model with a sentry mechanism. Our model integrates a prototype memory to store the long-term spatiotemporal cues of colonoscopy videos. Moreover, we devise adaptive prototypes to capture and generalize critical representations from individual frames, enabling long-term temporal fusion across labeled and unlabeled frames. In addition, we propose a correlation dynamic propagation module that propagates information from prototypes to features while simultaneously extracting dynamic features to perceive variations in polyp details between adjacent frames. Since colonoscopy scenes may change among consecutive frames, we further employ a sentry mechanism to assess the inter-frame continuity. This mechanism guides the prototype memory updating and the correlation dynamic propagation, further facilitating robust temporal propagation and dynamic detail perception for semi-supervised learning of long-term colonoscopy video sequences. Extensive experiments on the large-scale SUN-SEG dataset demonstrate that our model achieves optimal segmentation performance with real-time inference efficiency. Codes will be released upon publication.