cs.CVApr 13, 2026

TAMISeg: Text-Aligned Multi-scale Medical Image Segmentation with Semantic Encoder Distillation

Authors: Qiang Gao, Yi Wang, Yong Zhang, Yong Li, Yongbing Deng, Lan Du, Cunjian Chen

Organizations: Department of Data Science and AI, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia · College of Computer Science, Chongqing University, Chongqing, China · Chongqing University Central Hospital, School of Medicine, Chongqing, China

Abstract

Medical image segmentation remains challenging due to limited fine-grained annotations, complex anatomical structures, and image degradation from noise, low contrast, or illumination variation. We propose TAMISeg, a text-guided segmentation framework that incorporates clinical language prompts and semantic distillation as auxiliary semantic cues to enhance visual understanding and reduce reliance on pixel-level fine-grained annotations. TAMISeg integrates three core components: a consistency-aware encoder pretrained with strong perturbations for robust feature extraction, a semantic encoder distillation module with supervision from a frozen DINOv3 teacher to enhance semantic discriminability, and a scale-adaptive decoder that segments anatomical structures across different spatial scales. Experiments on the Kvasir-SEG, MosMedData+, and QaTa-COV19 datasets demonstrate that TAMISeg consistently outperforms existing uni-modal and multi-modal methods in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations. Code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/qczggaoqiang/TAMISeg.

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