No Arabic abstract
Primary angle closure glaucoma (PACG) is the leading cause of irreversible blindness among Asian people. Early detection of PACG is essential, so as to provide timely treatment and minimize the vision loss. In the clinical practice, PACG is diagnosed by analyzing the angle between the cornea and iris with anterior segment optical coherence tomography (AS-OCT). The rapid development of deep learning technologies provides the feasibility of building a computer-aided system for the fast and accurate segmentation of cornea and iris tissues. However, the application of deep learning methods in the medical imaging field is still restricted by the lack of enough fully-annotated samples. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to segment the target tissues accurately for the AS-OCT images, by using the combination of weakly-annotated images (majority) and fully-annotated images (minority). The proposed framework consists of two models which provide reliable guidance for each other. In addition, uncertainty guided strategies are adopted to increase the accuracy and stability of the guidance. Detailed experiments on the publicly available AGE dataset demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art semi-/weakly-supervised methods and has a comparable performance as the fully-supervised method. Therefore, the proposed method is demonstrated to be effective in exploiting information contained in the weakly-annotated images and has the capability to substantively relieve the annotation workload.
Recently, significant improvement has been made on semantic object segmentation due to the development of deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs). Training such a DCNN usually relies on a large number of images with pixel-level segmentation masks, and annotating these images is very costly in terms of both finance and human effort. In this paper, we propose a simple to complex (STC) framework in which only image-level annotations are utilized to learn DCNNs for semantic segmentation. Specifically, we first train an initial segmentation network called Initial-DCNN with the saliency maps of simple images (i.e., those with a single category of major object(s) and clean background). These saliency maps can be automatically obtained by existing bottom-up salient object detection techniques, where no supervision information is needed. Then, a better network called Enhanced-DCNN is learned with supervision from the predicted segmentation masks of simple images based on the Initial-DCNN as well as the image-level annotations. Finally, more pixel-level segmentation masks of complex images (two or more categories of objects with cluttered background), which are inferred by using Enhanced-DCNN and image-level annotations, are utilized as the supervision information to learn the Powerful-DCNN for semantic segmentation. Our method utilizes $40$K simple images from Flickr.com and 10K complex images from PASCAL VOC for step-wisely boosting the segmentation network. Extensive experimental results on PASCAL VOC 2012 segmentation benchmark well demonstrate the superiority of the proposed STC framework compared with other state-of-the-arts.
Weakly-supervised learning based on, e.g., partially labelled images or image-tags, is currently attracting significant attention in CNN segmentation as it can mitigate the need for full and laborious pixel/voxel annotations. Enforcing high-order (global) inequality constraints on the network output (for instance, to constrain the size of the target region) can leverage unlabeled data, guiding the training process with domain-specific knowledge. Inequality constraints are very flexible because they do not assume exact prior knowledge. However, constrained Lagrangian dual optimization has been largely avoided in deep networks, mainly for computational tractability reasons. To the best of our knowledge, the method of [Pathak et al., 2015] is the only prior work that addresses deep CNNs with linear constraints in weakly supervised segmentation. It uses the constraints to synthesize fully-labeled training masks (proposals) from weak labels, mimicking full supervision and facilitating dual optimization. We propose to introduce a differentiable penalty, which enforces inequality constraints directly in the loss function, avoiding expensive Lagrangian dual iterates and proposal generation. From constrained-optimization perspective, our simple penalty-based approach is not optimal as there is no guarantee that the constraints are satisfied. However, surprisingly, it yields substantially better results than the Lagrangian-based constrained CNNs in [Pathak et al., 2015], while reducing the computational demand for training. By annotating only a small fraction of the pixels, the proposed approach can reach a level of segmentation performance that is comparable to full supervision on three separate tasks. While our experiments focused on basic linear constraints such as the target-region size and image tags, our framework can be easily extended to other non-linear constraints.
Acquisition of training data for the standard semantic segmentation is expensive if requiring that each pixel is labeled. Yet, current methods significantly deteriorate in weakly supervised settings, e.g. where a fraction of pixels is labeled or when only image-level tags are available. It has been shown that regularized losses - originally developed for unsupervised low-level segmentation and representing geometric priors on pixel labels - can considerably improve the quality of weakly supervised training. However, many common priors require optimization stronger than gradient descent. Thus, such regularizers have limited applicability in deep learning. We propose a new robust trust region approach for regularized losses improving the state-of-the-art results. Our approach can be seen as a higher-order generalization of the classic chain rule. It allows neural network optimization to use strong low-level solvers for the corresponding regularizers, including discrete ones.
Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation (WSSS) based on image-level labels has been greatly advanced by exploiting the outputs of Class Activation Map (CAM) to generate the pseudo labels for semantic segmentation. However, CAM merely discovers seeds from a small number of regions, which may be insufficient to serve as pseudo masks for semantic segmentation. In this paper, we formulate the expansion of object regions in CAM as an increase in information. From the perspective of information theory, we propose a novel Complementary Patch (CP) Representation and prove that the information of the sum of the CAMs by a pair of input images with complementary hidden (patched) parts, namely CP Pair, is greater than or equal to the information of the baseline CAM. Therefore, a CAM with more information related to object seeds can be obtained by narrowing down the gap between the sum of CAMs generated by the CP Pair and the original CAM. We propose a CP Network (CPN) implemented by a triplet network and three regularization functions. To further improve the quality of the CAMs, we propose a Pixel-Region Correlation Module (PRCM) to augment the contextual information by using object-region relations between the feature maps and the CAMs. Experimental results on the PASCAL VOC 2012 datasets show that our proposed method achieves a new state-of-the-art in WSSS, validating the effectiveness of our CP Representation and CPN.
Segmentation of infected areas in chest CT volumes is of great significance for further diagnosis and treatment of COVID-19 patients. Due to the complex shapes and varied appearances of lesions, a large number of voxel-level labeled samples are generally required to train a lesion segmentation network, which is a main bottleneck for developing deep learning based medical image segmentation algorithms. In this paper, we propose a weakly-supervised lesion segmentation framework by embedding the Generative Adversarial training process into the Segmentation Network, which is called GASNet. GASNet is optimized to segment the lesion areas of a COVID-19 CT by the segmenter, and to replace the abnormal appearance with a generated normal appearance by the generator, so that the restored CT volumes are indistinguishable from healthy CT volumes by the discriminator. GASNet is supervised by chest CT volumes of many healthy and COVID-19 subjects without voxel-level annotations. Experiments on three public databases show that when using as few as one voxel-level labeled sample, the performance of GASNet is comparable to fully-supervised segmentation algorithms trained on dozens of voxel-level labeled samples.