A Dual-Stream Dental Panoramic X-Ray Image Segmentation Method Based on Transformer Heterogeneous Feature Complementation

Abstract

To address the widespread challenges of significant multi-category dental morphological variations and interference from overlapping anatomical structures in panoramic dental X-ray images, this paper proposes a dual-stream dental segmentation model based on Transformer heterogeneous feature complementarity. Firstly, we construct a parallel architecture comprising a Transformer semantic parsing branch and a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) detail capturing pathway, achieving collaborative optimization of global context modeling and local feature extraction. Furthermore, a Pooling-Cooperative Convolutional Module was designed, which enhances the model’s capability in detail extraction and boundary localization through weighted centroid features of dental structures and a latent edge extraction module. Finally, a Semantic Transformation Module and Interactive Fusion Module are constructed. The Semantic Transformation Module converts geometric detail features extracted from the CNN branch into high-order semantic representations compatible with Transformer sequential processing paradigms, while the Interactive Fusion Module applies attention mechanisms to progressively fuse dual-stream features, thereby enhancing the model’s capability in holistic dental feature extraction. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves an IoU of 91.49% and a Dice coefficient of 94.54%, outperforming current segmentation methods across multiple evaluation metrics.