No Arabic abstract
Robust automated organ segmentation is a prerequisite for computer-aided diagnosis (CAD), quantitative imaging analysis and surgical assistance. For high-variability organs such as the pancreas, previous approaches report undesirably low accuracies. We present a bottom-up approach for pancreas segmentation in abdominal CT scans that is based on a hierarchy of information propagation by classifying image patches at different resolutions; and cascading superpixels. There are four stages: 1) decomposing CT slice images as a set of disjoint boundary-preserving superpixels; 2) computing pancreas class probability maps via dense patch labeling; 3) classifying superpixels by pooling both intensity and probability features to form empirical statistics in cascaded random forest frameworks; and 4) simple connectivity based post-processing. The dense image patch labeling are conducted by: efficient random forest classifier on image histogram, location and texture features; and more expensive (but with better specificity) deep convolutional neural network classification on larger image windows (with more spatial contexts). Evaluation of the approach is performed on a database of 80 manually segmented CT volumes in six-fold cross-validation (CV). Our achieved results are comparable, or better than the state-of-the-art methods (evaluated by leave-one-patient-out), with Dice 70.7% and Jaccard 57.9%. The computational efficiency has been drastically improved in the order of 6~8 minutes, comparing with others of ~10 hours per case. Finally, we implement a multi-atlas label fusion (MALF) approach for pancreas segmentation using the same datasets. Under six-fold CV, our bottom-up segmentation method significantly outperforms its MALF counterpart: (70.7 +/- 13.0%) versus (52.5 +/- 20.8%) in Dice. Deep CNN patch labeling confidences offer more numerical stability, reflected by smaller standard deviations.
Superpixel algorithms are a common pre-processing step for computer vision algorithms such as segmentation, object tracking and localization. Many superpixel methods only rely on colors features for segmentation, limiting performance in low-contrast regions and applicability to infrared or medical images where object boundaries have wide appearance variability. We study the inclusion of deep image features in the SLIC superpixel algorithm to exploit higher-level image representations. In addition, we devise a trainable superpixel algorithm, yielding an intermediate domain-specific image representation that can be applied to different tasks. A clustering-based superpixel algorithm is transformed into a pixel-wise classification task and superpixel training data is derived from semantic segmentation datasets. Our results demonstrate that this approach is able to improve superpixel quality consistently.
With the renaissance of neural networks, object detection has slowly shifted from a bottom-up recognition problem to a top-down approach. Best in class algorithms enumerate a near-complete list of objects and classify each into object/not object. In this paper, we show that strong performance can still be achieved using a bottom-up approach for vision-based object recognition tasks and achieve competitive video game play. We propose PuckNet, which is used to detect four extreme points (top, left, bottom, and right-most points) and one center point of objects using a fully convolutional neural network. Object detection is then a purely keypoint-based appearance estimation problem, without implicit feature learning or region classification. The method proposed herein performs on-par with the best in class region-based detection methods, with a bounding box AP of 36.4% on COCO test-dev. In addition, the extreme points estimated directly resolve into a rectangular object mask, with a COCO Mask AP of 17.6%, outperforming the Mask AP of vanilla bounding boxes. Guided segmentation of extreme points further improves this to 32.1% Mask AP. We applied the PuckNet vision system to the SuperTuxKart video game to test its capacity to achieve competitive play in dynamic and co-operative multiplayer environments.
Tensor networks are efficient factorisations of high dimensional tensors into a network of lower order tensors. They have been most commonly used to model entanglement in quantum many-body systems and more recently are witnessing increased applications in supervised machine learning. In this work, we formulate image segmentation in a supervised setting with tensor networks. The key idea is to first lift the pixels in image patches to exponentially high dimensional feature spaces and using a linear decision hyper-plane to classify the input pixels into foreground and background classes. The high dimensional linear model itself is approximated using the matrix product state (MPS) tensor network. The MPS is weight-shared between the non-overlapping image patches resulting in our strided tensor network model. The performance of the proposed model is evaluated on three 2D- and one 3D- biomedical imaging datasets. The performance of the proposed tensor network segmentation model is compared with relevant baseline methods. In the 2D experiments, the tensor network model yeilds competitive performance compared to the baseline methods while being more resource efficient.
In this work, we introduce Panoptic-DeepLab, a simple, strong, and fast system for panoptic segmentation, aiming to establish a solid baseline for bottom-up methods that can achieve comparable performance of two-stage methods while yielding fast inference speed. In particular, Panoptic-DeepLab adopts the dual-ASPP and dual-decoder structures specific to semantic, and instance segmentation, respectively. The semantic segmentation branch is the same as the typical design of any semantic segmentation model (e.g., DeepLab), while the instance segmentation branch is class-agnostic, involving a simple instance center regression. As a result, our single Panoptic-DeepLab simultaneously ranks first at all three Cityscapes benchmarks, setting the new state-of-art of 84.2% mIoU, 39.0% AP, and 65.5% PQ on test set. Additionally, equipped with MobileNetV3, Panoptic-DeepLab runs nearly in real-time with a single 1025x2049 image (15.8 frames per second), while achieving a competitive performance on Cityscapes (54.1 PQ% on test set). On Mapillary Vistas test set, our ensemble of six models attains 42.7% PQ, outperforming the challenge winner in 2018 by a healthy margin of 1.5%. Finally, our Panoptic-DeepLab also performs on par with several top-down approaches on the challenging COCO dataset. For the first time, we demonstrate a bottom-up approach could deliver state-of-the-art results on panoptic segmentation.
In this work, we address the task of referring image segmentation (RIS), which aims at predicting a segmentation mask for the object described by a natural language expression. Most existing methods focus on establishing unidirectional or directional relationships between visual and linguistic features to associate two modalities together, while the multi-scale context is ignored or insufficiently modeled. Multi-scale context is crucial to localize and segment those objects that have large scale variations during the multi-modal fusion process. To solve this problem, we propose a simple yet effective Cascaded Multi-modal Fusion (CMF) module, which stacks multiple atrous convolutional layers in parallel and further introduces a cascaded branch to fuse visual and linguistic features. The cascaded branch can progressively integrate multi-scale contextual information and facilitate the alignment of two modalities during the multi-modal fusion process. Experimental results on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms most state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/jianhua2022/CMF-Refseg.