No Arabic abstract
Deep learning (DL)-based models have demonstrated good performance in medical image segmentation. However, the models trained on a known dataset often fail when performed on an unseen dataset collected from different centers, vendors and disease populations. In this work, we present a random style transfer network to tackle the domain generalization problem for multi-vendor and center cardiac image segmentation. Style transfer is used to generate training data with a wider distribution/ heterogeneity, namely domain augmentation. As the target domain could be unknown, we randomly generate a modality vector for the target modality in the style transfer stage, to simulate the domain shift for unknown domains. The model can be trained in a semi-supervised manner by simultaneously optimizing a supervised segmentation and an unsupervised style translation objective. Besides, the framework incorporates the spatial information and shape prior of the target by introducing two regularization terms. We evaluated the proposed framework on 40 subjects from the M&Ms challenge2020, and obtained promising performance in the segmentation for data from unknown vendors and centers.
Style transfer aims to reproduce content images with the styles from reference images. Existing universal style transfer methods successfully deliver arbitrary styles to original images either in an artistic or a photo-realistic way. However, the range of arbitrary style defined by existing works is bounded in the particular domain due to their structural limitation. Specifically, the degrees of content preservation and stylization are established according to a predefined target domain. As a result, both photo-realistic and artistic models have difficulty in performing the desired style transfer for the other domain. To overcome this limitation, we propose a unified architecture, Domain-aware Style Transfer Networks (DSTN) that transfer not only the style but also the property of domain (i.e., domainness) from a given reference image. To this end, we design a novel domainness indicator that captures the domainness value from the texture and structural features of reference images. Moreover, we introduce a unified framework with domain-aware skip connection to adaptively transfer the stroke and palette to the input contents guided by the domainness indicator. Our extensive experiments validate that our model produces better qualitative results and outperforms previous methods in terms of proxy metrics on both artistic and photo-realistic stylizations.
As a recent noticeable topic, domain generalization (DG) aims to first learn a generic model on multiple source domains and then directly generalize to an arbitrary unseen target domain without any additional adaption. In previous DG models, by generating virtual data to supplement observed source domains, the data augmentation based methods have shown its effectiveness. To simulate the possible unseen domains, most of them enrich the diversity of original data via image-level style transformation. However, we argue that the potential styles are hard to be exhaustively illustrated and fully augmented due to the limited referred styles, leading the diversity could not be always guaranteed. Unlike image-level augmentation, we in this paper develop a simple yet effective feature-based style randomization module to achieve feature-level augmentation, which can produce random styles via integrating random noise into the original style. Compared with existing image-level augmentation, our feature-level augmentation favors a more goal-oriented and sample-diverse way. Furthermore, to sufficiently explore the efficacy of the proposed module, we design a novel progressive training strategy to enable all parameters of the network to be fully trained. Extensive experiments on three standard benchmark datasets, i.e., PACS, VLCS and Office-Home, highlight the superiority of our method compared to the state-of-the-art methods.
Arbitrary style transfer aims to synthesize a content image with the style of an image to create a third image that has never been seen before. Recent arbitrary style transfer algorithms find it challenging to balance the content structure and the style patterns. Moreover, simultaneously maintaining the global and local style patterns is difficult due to the patch-based mechanism. In this paper, we introduce a novel style-attentional network (SANet) that efficiently and flexibly integrates the local style patterns according to the semantic spatial distribution of the content image. A new identity loss function and multi-level feature embeddings enable our SANet and decoder to preserve the content structure as much as possible while enriching the style patterns. Experimental results demonstrate that our algorithm synthesizes stylized images in real-time that are higher in quality than those produced by the state-of-the-art algorithms.
In this paper, we propose a photorealistic style transfer network to emphasize the natural effect of photorealistic image stylization. In general, distortion of the image content and lacking of details are two typical issues in the style transfer field. To this end, we design a novel framework employing the U-Net structure to maintain the rich spatial clues, with a multi-layer feature aggregation (MFA) method to simultaneously provide the details obtained by the shallow layers in the stylization processing. In particular, an encoder based on the dense block and a decoder form a symmetrical structure of U-Net are jointly staked to realize an effective feature extraction and image reconstruction. Besides, a transfer module based on MFA and adaptive instance normalization (AdaIN) is inserted in the skip connection positions to achieve the stylization. Accordingly, the stylized image possesses the texture of a real photo and preserves rich content details without introducing any mask or post-processing steps. The experimental results on public datasets demonstrate that our method achieves a more faithful structural similarity with a lower style loss, reflecting the effectiveness and merit of our approach.
Extensive research in neural style transfer methods has shown that the correlation between features extracted by a pre-trained VGG network has a remarkable ability to capture the visual style of an image. Surprisingly, however, this stylization quality is not robust and often degrades significantly when applied to features from more advanced and lightweight networks, such as those in the ResNet family. By performing extensive experiments with different network architectures, we find that residual connections, which represent the main architectural difference between VGG and ResNet, produce feature maps of small entropy, which are not suitable for style transfer. To improve the robustness of the ResNet architecture, we then propose a simple yet effective solution based on a softmax transformation of the feature activations that enhances their entropy. Experimental results demonstrate that this small magic can greatly improve the quality of stylization results, even for networks with random weights. This suggests that the architecture used for feature extraction is more important than the use of learned weights for the task of style transfer.