No Arabic abstract
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.
Minimization of regularized losses is a principled approach to weak supervision well-established in deep learning, in general. However, it is largely overlooked in semantic segmentation currently dominated by methods mimicking full supervision via fake fully-labeled training masks (proposals) generated from available partial input. To obtain such full masks the typical methods explicitly use standard regularization techniques for shallow segmentation, e.g. graph cuts or dense CRFs. In contrast, we integrate such standard regularizers directly into the loss functions over partial input. This approach simplifies weakly-supervised training by avoiding extra MRF/CRF inference steps or layers explicitly generating full masks, while improving both the quality and efficiency of training. This paper proposes and experimentally compares different losses integrating MRF/CRF regularization terms. We juxtapose our regularized losses with earlier proposal-generation methods using explicit regularization steps or layers. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art accuracy in semantic segmentation with near full-supervision quality.
We propose adversarial constrained-CNN loss, a new paradigm of constrained-CNN loss methods, for weakly supervised medical image segmentation. In the new paradigm, prior knowledge is encoded and depicted by reference masks, and is further employed to impose constraints on segmentation outputs through adversarial learning with reference masks. Unlike pseudo label methods for weakly supervised segmentation, such reference masks are used to train a discriminator rather than a segmentation network, and thus are not required to be paired with specific images. Our new paradigm not only greatly facilitates imposing prior knowledge on networks outputs, but also provides stronger and higher-order constraints, i.e., distribution approximation, through adversarial learning. Extensive experiments involving different medical modalities, different anatomical structures, different topologies of the object of interest, different levels of prior knowledge and weakly supervised annotations with different annotation ratios is conducted to evaluate our ACCL method. Consistently superior segmentation results over the size constrained-CNN loss method have been achieved, some of which are close to the results of full supervision, thus fully verifying the effectiveness and generalization of our method. Specifically, we report an average Dice score of 75.4% with an average annotation ratio of 0.65%, surpassing the prior art, i.e., the size constrained-CNN loss method, by a large margin of 11.4%. Our codes are made publicly available at https://github.com/PengyiZhang/ACCL.
Most recent semantic segmentation methods train deep convolutional neural networks with fully annotated masks requiring pixel-accuracy for good quality training. Common weakly-supervised approaches generate full masks from partial input (e.g. scribbles or seeds) using standard interactive segmentation methods as preprocessing. But, errors in such masks result in poorer training since standard loss functions (e.g. cross-entropy) do not distinguish seeds from potentially mislabeled other pixels. Inspired by the general ideas in semi-supervised learning, we address these problems via a new principled loss function evaluating network output with criteria standard in shallow segmentation, e.g. normalized cut. Unlike prior work, the cross entropy part of our loss evaluates only seeds where labels are known while normalized cut softly evaluates consistency of all pixels. We focus on normalized cut loss where dense Gaussian kernel is efficiently implemented in linear time by fast Bilateral filtering. Our normalized cut loss approach to segmentation brings the quality of weakly-supervised training significantly closer to fully supervised methods.
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.