Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Evaluation metrics are central to binary target segmentation because they determine how progress is measured, compared, and interpreted. In this paper, target denotes the task-defined positive region to be segmented rather than a generic foreground object. It may be salient, camouflaged, transparent, glass-like, mirror-like, shadow-like, lesion-like, or defined by other application-specific semantics. We treat existing metrics as compositions of modular design choices rather than isolated formulas. The proposed framework decomposes each metric into five stages covering prediction representation, target extraction, target matching, score computation, and metric reporting. We use this framework to analyze representative metrics and show how newer metrics address specific limits in earlier protocols. The stage choices keep each metric's assumptions visible. We then discuss the design space opened by the framework and its implications for task-aware evaluation protocols. Reference code is available at https://github.com/lartpang/PySODMetrics.
Source: arXiv (Cornell University)
Authors: Pang, Youwei, Zhao, Xiaoqi
Institution: Nanyang Technological University
Subfield: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7167078746
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