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We propose a novel method for fine-grained high-quality image segmentation of both objects and scenes. Inspired by dilation and erosion from morphological image processing techniques, we treat the pixel level segmentation problems as squeezing object boundary. From this perspective, we propose textbf{Boundary Squeeze} module: a novel and efficient module that squeezes the object boundary from both inner and outer directions which leads to precise mask representation. To generate such squeezed representation, we propose a new bidirectionally flow-based warping process and design specific loss signals to supervise the learning process. Boundary Squeeze Module can be easily applied to both instance and semantic segmentation tasks as a plug-and-play module by building on top of existing models. We show that our simple yet effective design can lead to high qualitative results on several different datasets and we also provide several different metrics on boundary to prove the effectiveness over previous work. Moreover, the proposed module is light-weighted and thus has potential for practical usage. Our method yields large gains on COCO, Cityscapes, for both instance and semantic segmentation and outperforms previous state-of-the-art PointRend in both accuracy and speed under the same setting. Code and model will be available.
We present a new method for efficient high-quality image segmentation of objects and scenes. By analogizing classical computer graphics methods for efficient rendering with over- and undersampling challenges faced in pixel labeling tasks, we develop a unique perspective of image segmentation as a rendering problem. From this vantage, we present the PointRend (Point-based Rendering) neural network module: a module that performs point-based segmentation predictions at adaptively selected locations based on an iterative subdivision algorithm. PointRend can be flexibly applied to both instance and semantic segmentation tasks by building on top of existing state-of-the-art models. While many concrete implementations of the general idea are possible, we show that a simple design already achieves excellent results. Qualitatively, PointRend outputs crisp object boundaries in regions that are over-smoothed by previous methods. Quantitatively, PointRend yields significant gains on COCO and Cityscapes, for both instance and semantic segmentation. PointRends efficiency enables output resolutions that are otherwise impractical in terms of memory or computation compared to existing approaches. Code has been made available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/detectron2/tree/master/projects/PointRend.
We focus on an important yet challenging problem: using a 2D deep network to deal with 3D segmentation for medical image analysis. Existing approaches either applied multi-view planar (2D) networks or directly used volumetric (3D) networks for this purpose, but both of them are not ideal: 2D networks cannot capture 3D contexts effectively, and 3D networks are both memory-consuming and less stable arguably due to the lack of pre-trained models. In this paper, we bridge the gap between 2D and 3D using a novel approach named Elastic Boundary Projection (EBP). The key observation is that, although the object is a 3D volume, what we really need in segmentation is to find its boundary which is a 2D surface. Therefore, we place a number of pivot points in the 3D space, and for each pivot, we determine its distance to the object boundary along a dense set of directions. This creates an elastic shell around each pivot which is initialized as a perfect sphere. We train a 2D deep network to determine whether each ending point falls within the object, and gradually adjust the shell so that it gradually converges to the actual shape of the boundary and thus achieves the goal of segmentation. EBP allows boundary-based segmentation without cutting a 3D volume into slices or patches, which stands out from conventional 2D and 3D approaches. EBP achieves promising accuracy in abdominal organ segmentation. Our code has been open-sourced https://github.com/twni2016/Elastic-Boundary-Projection.
We present Boundary IoU (Intersection-over-Union), a new segmentation evaluation measure focused on boundary quality. We perform an extensive analysis across different error types and object sizes and show that Boundary IoU is significantly more sensitive than the standard Mask IoU measure to boundary errors for large objects and does not over-penalize errors on smaller objects. The new quality measure displays several desirable characteristics like symmetry w.r.t. prediction/ground truth pairs and balanced responsiveness across scales, which makes it more suitable for segmentation evaluation than other boundary-focused measures like Trimap IoU and F-measure. Based on Boundary IoU, we update the standard evaluation protocols for instance and panoptic segmentation tasks by proposing the Boundary AP (Average Precision) and Boundary PQ (Panoptic Quality) metrics, respectively. Our experiments show that the new evaluation metrics track boundary quality improvements that are generally overlooked by current Mask IoU-based evaluation metrics. We hope that the adoption of the new boundary-sensitive evaluation metrics will lead to rapid progress in segmentation methods that improve boundary quality.
Rapid growth in the field of quantitative digital image analysis is paving the way for researchers to make precise measurements about objects in an image. To compute quantities from the image such as the density of compressed materials or the velocity of a shockwave, we must determine object boundaries. Images containing regions that each have a spatial trend in intensity are of particular interest. We present a supervised image segmentation method that incorporates spatial information to locate boundaries between regions with overlapping intensity histograms. The segmentation of a pixel is determined by comparing its intensity to distributions from local, nearby pixel intensities. Because of the statistical nature of the algorithm, we use maximum likelihood estimation theory to quantify uncertainty about each boundary. We demonstrate the success of this algorithm on a radiograph of a multicomponent cylinder and on an optical image of a laser-induced shockwave, and we provide final boundary locations with associated bands of uncertainty.
Image segmentation is a fundamental vision task and a crucial step for many applications. In this paper, we propose a fast image segmentation method based on a novel super boundary-to-pixel direction (super-BPD) and a customized segmentation algorithm with super-BPD. Precisely, we define BPD on each pixel as a two-dimensional unit vector pointing from its nearest boundary to the pixel. In the BPD, nearby pixels from different regions have opposite directions departing from each other, and adjacent pixels in the same region have directions pointing to the other or each other (i.e., around medial points). We make use of such property to partition an image into super-BPDs, which are novel informative superpixels with robust direction similarity for fast grouping into segmentation regions. Extensive experimental results on BSDS500 and Pascal Context demonstrate the accuracy and efficency of the proposed super-BPD in segmenting images. In practice, the proposed super-BPD achieves comparable or superior performance with MCG while running at ~25fps vs. 0.07fps. Super-BPD also exhibits a noteworthy transferability to unseen scenes. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/JianqiangWan/Super-BPD.