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Superpixel-graph self-supervised pretraining with joint-embedding and contrastive objectives for wound image segmentation
 
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1
Computer Science Department, Ukrainian National Forestry University, 103 Gen. Chuprynky St., Room 45, 79057 Lviv, Ukraine
 
2
Department of Computer Design Systems, Lviv Polytechnic National University, 3 Metropolitan Andrey St., Building IV, Room 324, 79013 Lviv, Ukraine
 
 
Publication date: 2026-06-10
 
 
Corresponding author
Bohdan Lukashchuk   

Computer Science Department, Ukrainian National Forestry University, 103 Gen. Chuprynky St., Room 45, 79057 Lviv, Ukraine
 
 
Adv. Sci. Technol. Res. J. 2026; 20(9)
 
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ABSTRACT
Annotated data remain a major problem and bottleneck for supervised learning approaches, especially in wound imaging. In this work, we propose a self-supervised learning pretraining method that represents a wound image as a superpixel adjacency graph, generated using the simple linear iterative clustering algorithm and uses graph structure to define building blocks for calculating joint-embedding and contrastive learning objectives. We evaluate three objective variants - contrastive, joint-embedding and their combination as a pretraining stage for further finetuning for the wound segmentation task. After self-supervised pretraining on 100 unlabelled images and supervised fine-tuning on only 30 labelled images using the contrastive objective, we received a Dice score of 0.266 on a 400-image test set, compared to 0.354 for a fully supervised U-Net trained on all 100 annotated images, thus having gap of 0.088 in Dice score with more than three times less annotated data. The results suggest that superpixel-graph-based self-supervised learning is a promising pretraining strategy for wound analysis in settings with limited annotated data.
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