“…Patients with COVID-19 have an incubation period at first, followed by symptoms such as fever, fatigue, and sore throat, and can also lead to pneumonia. COVID-19 severely impacts people's safety worldwide and the economic development of countries ( Aneja et al, 2021 , Jalušić Glunčić et al, 2021 ), so a tool is needed to detect the virus early and provide timely treatment. To date, chest X-rays images play a crucial part in the diagnosis of COVID-19; the resultant X-ray images are extracted as normal images and are segmented into small regions with different information, some of which may contain features of COVID-19, and this process is commonly referred to as the image segmentation (IS) problem ( Amyar, Modzelewski, Li, & Ruan, 2020 ; Xiaocong Chen et al, 2021 , Di et al, 2021 ).…”