Intra-Class Subdivision for Pixel Contrastive Learning: Application to Semi-supervised Cardiac Image Segmentation

We propose an intra-class subdivision pixel contrastive learning (SPCL) framework for cardiac image segmentation to address representation contamination at boundaries. The novel concept ``Unconcerned sample'' is proposed to distinguish pixel representations at the inner and boundary regions within the same class, facilitating a clearer characterization of intra-class variations. A novel boundary contrastive loss for boundary representations is proposed to enhance representation discrimination across boundaries. The advantages of the unconcerned sample and boundary contrastive loss are analyzed theoretically. Experimental results in public cardiac datasets demonstrate that SPCL significantly improves segmentation performance, outperforming existing methods with respect to segmentation quality and boundary precision. Our code is available at https://github.com/Jrstud203/SPCL.