The use of deep learning for medical imaging has seen tremendous growth in the research community. One reason for the slow uptake of these systems in the clinical setting is that they are complex, opaque and tend to fail silently. Outside of the medical imaging domain, the machine learning community has recently proposed several techniques for quantifying model uncertainty (i.e.~a model knowing when it has failed). This is important in practical settings, as we can refer such cases to manual inspection or correction by humans. In this paper, we aim to bring these recent results on estimating uncertainty to bear on two important outputs in deep learning-based segmentation. The first is producing spatial uncertainty maps, from which a clinician can observe where and why a system thinks it is failing. The second is quantifying an image-level prediction of failure, which is useful for isolating specific cases and removing them from automated pipelines. We also show that reasoning about spatial uncertainty, the first output, is a useful intermediate representation for generating segmentation quality predictions, the second output. We propose a two-stage architecture for producing these measures of uncertainty, which can accommodate any deep learning-based medical segmentation pipeline.
BoxCell: Leveraging SAM for Cell Segmentation with Box Supervision
India Institute Of Technology, Yardi School of Artificial Intelligence（印度理工学院，人工智能学院）；India Institute Of Technology, Department of Computer Science and Engineering（印度理工学院，计算机科学与工程系）；Indian Institute of Science, Department of Electrical Communication Engineering（印度科学研究院，电子通信工程系）
PSL University（巴黎文理研究大学）；Mines Paris（巴黎矿业学院）；Centre for Computational Biology（计算生物学中心）；Institut Curie（居里研究所）；INSERM（法国国家健康与医学研究院）；University of Montpellier（蒙彼利埃大学）；IGH（人类遗传学研究所）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）
Deep learning provides us with powerful methods to perform nucleus or cell segmentation with unprecedented quality. However, these methods usually require large training sets of manually annotated images, which are tedious and expensive to generate. In this paper we propose to use In Silico Labeling (ISL) as a pretraining scheme for segmentation tasks. The strategy is to acquire label-free microscopy images (such as bright-field or phase contrast) along fluorescently labeled images (such as DAPI or CellMask). We then train a model to predict the fluorescently labeled images from the label-free…
Nanjing University（南京大学）；Shandong Women’s University（山东女子学院）；Tencent（腾讯）；Suzhou Science and Technology Town Hospital（苏州科技城医院）；Suzhou Institute of Biomedical Engineering and Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院苏州生物医学工程技术研究所）
Robust segmentation for non-elongated tissues in medical images is hard to realize due to the large variation of the shape, size, and appearance of these tissues in different patients. In this paper, we present an end-to-end trainable deep segmentation model termed Crossover-Net for robust segmentation in medical images. Our proposed model is inspired by an insightful observation: during segmentation, the representation from the horizontal and vertical directions can provide different local appearance and orthogonality context information, which helps enhance the discrimination between differe…
Automatic segmentation of brain abnormalities is challenging, as they vary considerably from one pathology to another. Current methods are supervised and require numerous annotated images for each pathology, a strenuous task. To tackle anatomical variability, Unsupervised Anomaly Detection (UAD) methods are proposed, detecting anomalies as outliers of a healthy model learned using a Variational Autoencoder (VAE). Previous work on UAD adopted a 2D approach, meaning that MRIs are processed as a collection of independent slices. Yet, it does not fully exploit the spatial information contained in …
Automated segmentation of human cardiac magnetic resonance datasets has been steadily improving during recent years. However, these methods are not directly applicable in preclinical context due to limited datasets and lower image resolution. Successful application of deep architectures for rat cardiac segmentation, although of critical importance for preclinical evaluation of cardiac function, has to our knowledge not yet been reported. We developed segmentation models that expand on the standard U-Net architecture and evaluated separate models for systole and diastole phases, 2MSA, and one m…
Melbourne Data Analytics Platform（墨尔本数据分析平台）；University of Melbourne（墨尔本大学）
Improving automated analysis of medical imaging will provide clinicians more options in providing care for patients. The 2023 AI-enabled Medical Image Analysis Workshop and Covid-19 Diagnosis Competition (AI-MIA-COV19D) provides an opportunity to test and refine machine learning methods for detecting the presence and severity of COVID-19 in patients from CT scans. This paper presents version 2 of Cov3d, a deep learning model submitted in the 2022 competition. The model has been improved through a preprocessing step which segments the lungs in the CT scan and crops the input to this region. It …
Leveraging Anatomical Constraints with Uncertainty for Pneumothorax Segmentation
Duke-NUS Medical School（杜克-新加坡国立大学医学院）；Duke University（杜克大学）；Singapore General Hospital（新加坡中央医院）；Institute of High Performance Computing, Agency for Science, Technology and Research（新加坡科技研究局高性能计算研究所）；Institute of Data Science, National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学数据科学研究院）
Pennsylvania State University（宾夕法尼亚州立大学）；Tencent Hippocrates Research Lab（腾讯希波克拉底研究实验室）；Shandong Cancer Hospital and Institute（山东省肿瘤医院研究院）
In this work, we propose to resolve the issue existing in current deep learning based organ segmentation systems that they often produce results that do not capture the overall shape of the target organ and often lack smoothness. Since there is a rigorous mapping between the Signed Distance Map (SDM) calculated from object boundary contours and the binary segmentation map, we exploit the feasibility of learning the SDM directly from medical scans. By converting the segmentation task into predicting an SDM, we show that our proposed method retains superior segmentation performance and has bette…
Univ. Grenoble Alpes（格勒诺布尔阿尔卑斯大学）；Inria（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Grenoble INP（格勒诺布尔国立高等物理、数学与信息学院）；New York University（纽约大学）；Facebook AI Research（Facebook人工智能研究院）
Anticipating future events is an important prerequisite towards intelligent behavior. Video forecasting has been studied as a proxy task towards this goal. Recent work has shown that to predict semantic segmentation of future frames, forecasting at the semantic level is more effective than forecasting RGB frames and then segmenting these. In this paper we consider the more challenging problem of future instance segmentation, which additionally segments out individual objects. To deal with a varying number of output labels per image, we develop a predictive model in the space of fixed-sized con…
Google Brain（谷歌大脑）；University of Texas at Austin（得克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）
Predicting the future to anticipate the outcome of events and actions is a critical attribute of autonomous agents; particularly for agents which must rely heavily on real time visual data for decision making. Working towards this capability, we address the task of predicting future frame segmentation from a stream of monocular video by leveraging the 3D structure of the scene. Our framework is based on learnable sub-modules capable of predicting pixel-wise scene semantic labels, depth, and camera ego-motion of adjacent frames. We further propose a recurrent neural network based model capable …
Boston University（波士顿大学）；Facebook AI Research（Facebook人工智能研究院）；The University of Texas at Austin（得克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；CognitiveScale
Foreground object segmentation is a critical step for many image analysis tasks. While automated methods can produce high-quality results, their failures disappoint users in need of practical solutions. We propose a resource allocation framework for predicting how best to allocate a fixed budget of human annotation effort in order to collect higher quality segmentations for a given batch of images and automated methods. The framework is based on a prediction module that estimates the quality of given algorithm-drawn segmentations. We demonstrate the value of the framework for two novel tasks r…
Imperial College London（伦敦帝国学院）；The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust（皇家马斯登国民医疗服务基金会）
When integrating computational tools such as automatic segmentation into clinical practice, it is of utmost importance to be able to assess the level of accuracy on new data, and in particular, to detect when an automatic method fails. However, this is difficult to achieve due to absence of ground truth. Segmentation accuracy on clinical data might be different from what is found through cross-validation because validation data is often used during incremental method development, which can lead to overfitting and unrealistic performance expectations. Before deployment, performance is quantifie…
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
Current semantic segmentation models cannot easily generalize to new object classes unseen during train time: they require additional annotated images and retraining. We propose a novel segmentation model that injects visual priors into semantic segmentation architectures, allowing them to segment out new target labels without retraining. As visual priors, we use the activations of pretrained image classifiers, which provide noisy indications of the spatial location of both the target object and distractor objects in the scene. We leverage language semantics to obtain these activations for a t…
University of Texas at Austin（得克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；Boston University（波士顿大学）
We propose the ambiguity problem for the foreground object segmentation task and motivate the importance of estimating and accounting for this ambiguity when designing vision systems. Specifically, we distinguish between images which lead multiple annotators to segment different foreground objects (ambiguous) versus minor inter-annotator differences of the same object. Taking images from eight widely used datasets, we crowdsource labeling the images as "ambiguous" or "not ambiguous" to segment in order to construct a new dataset we call STATIC. Using STATIC, we develop a system that automatica…
Facebook AI Research（Facebook 人工智能研究院）；Inria Grenoble, Laboratoire Jean Kuntzmann, Université Grenoble Alpes（格勒诺布尔阿尔卑斯大学 Jean Kuntzmann 实验室、法国国家信息与自动化研究所格勒诺布尔中心）；New York University（纽约大学）
The ability to predict and therefore to anticipate the future is an important attribute of intelligence. It is also of utmost importance in real-time systems, e.g. in robotics or autonomous driving, which depend on visual scene understanding for decision making. While prediction of the raw RGB pixel values in future video frames has been studied in previous work, here we introduce the novel task of predicting semantic segmentations of future frames. Given a sequence of video frames, our goal is to predict segmentation maps of not yet observed video frames that lie up to a second or further in …
A Sensor Agnostic Domain Generalization Framework for Leveraging Geospatial Foundation Models: Enhancing Semantic Segmentation viaSynergistic Pseudo-Labeling and Generative Learning
University of Houston（休斯敦大学）；Purdue University（普渡大学）
Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Institute for Infocomm Research, A*STAR（新加坡科技研究局资讯通信研究院）
Segmenting video content into events provides semantic structures for indexing, retrieval, and summarization. Since motion cues are not available in continuous photo-streams, and annotations in lifelogging are scarce and costly, the frames are usually clustered into events by comparing the visual features between them in an unsupervised way. However, such methodologies are ineffective to deal with heterogeneous events, e.g. taking a walk, and temporary changes in the sight direction, e.g. at a meeting. To address these limitations, we propose Contextual Event Segmentation (CES), a novel segmen…
EMBL Heidelberg（欧洲分子生物学实验室海德堡分部）；HCI University of Heidelberg（海德堡大学人机交互中心）；COS University of Heidelberg（海德堡大学计算机科学系）
The throughput of electron microscopes has increased significantly in recent years, enabling detailed analysis of cell morphology and ultrastructure. Analysis of neural circuits at single-synapse resolution remains the flagship target of this technique, but applications to cell and developmental biology are also starting to emerge at scale. The amount of data acquired in such studies makes manual instance segmentation, a fundamental step in many analysis pipelines, impossible. While automatic segmentation approaches have improved significantly thanks to the adoption of convolutional neural net…
FZI Research Center for Information Technology（FZI信息技术研究中心）；Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)（卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院（KIT））
Recent advances in the area of plane segmentation from single RGB images show strong accuracy improvements and now allow a reliable segmentation of indoor scenes into planes. Nonetheless, fine-grained details of these segmentation masks are still lacking accuracy, thus restricting the usability of such techniques on a larger scale in numerous applications, such as inpainting for Augmented Reality use cases. We propose a post-processing algorithm to align the segmented plane masks with edges detected in the image. This allows us to increase the accuracy of state-of-the-art approaches, while lim…
Wuhan University（武汉大学）；JD Explore Academy（京东探索研究院）；Hubei Luojia Laboratory（湖北珞珈实验室）；Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）
Few-shot part segmentation aims to separate different parts of an object given only a few annotated samples. Due to the challenge of limited data, existing works mainly focus on learning classifiers over pre-trained features, failing to learn task-specific features for part segmentation. In this paper, we propose to learn task-specific features in a "pre-training"-"fine-tuning" paradigm. We conduct prompt designing to reduce the gap between the pre-train task (i.e., image generation) and the downstream task (i.e., part segmentation), so that the GAN priors for generation can be leveraged for s…
National Taiwan University（台湾大学）；National Tsing Hua University（清华大学）
Anomaly awareness is an essential capability for safety-critical applications such as autonomous driving. While recent progress of robotics and computer vision has enabled anomaly detection for image classification, anomaly detection on semantic segmentation is less explored. Conventional anomaly-aware systems assuming other existing classes as out-of-distribution (pseudo-unknown) classes for training a model will result in two drawbacks. (1) Unknown classes, which applications need to cope with, might not actually exist during training time. (2) Model performance would strongly rely on the cl…
Escola Politècnica Superior, Universitat de Girona（赫罗纳大学高等理工学院）
Fully automatic detection of skin lesions in dermatoscopic images can facilitate early diagnosis and repression of malignant melanoma and non-melanoma skin cancer. Although convolutional neural networks are a powerful solution, they are limited by the illumination spectrum of annotated dermatoscopic screening images, where color is an important discriminative feature. In this paper, we propose an adaptive color augmentation technique to amplify data expression and model performance, while regulating color difference and saturation to minimize the risks of using synthetic data. Through deep vis…
CyclePose -- Leveraging Cycle-Consistency for Annotation-Free Nuclei Segmentation in Fluorescence Microscopy
Friedrich-Alexander-Universität (FAU)（弗里德里希-亚历山大-埃尔朗根-纽伦堡大学（FAU））；Universität Würzburg（维尔茨堡大学）；Center for AI and Data Science (CAIDAS)（人工智能与数据科学中心（CAIDAS））
Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；University of Maryland Baltimore County（马里兰大学巴尔的摩分校）
Understanding human actions is a key problem in computer vision. However, recognizing actions is only the first step of understanding what a person is doing. In this paper, we introduce the problem of predicting why a person has performed an action in images. This problem has many applications in human activity understanding, such as anticipating or explaining an action. To study this problem, we introduce a new dataset of people performing actions annotated with likely motivations. However, the information in an image alone may not be sufficient to automatically solve this task. Since humans …
Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；Skoltech（斯科尔科沃科学技术研究院）
In design of instance segmentation networks that reconstruct masks, segmentation is often taken as its literal definition -- assigning each pixel a label. This has led to thinking the problem as a template matching one with the goal of minimizing the loss between the reconstructed and the ground truth pixels. Rethinking reconstruction networks as a generator, we define the problem of predicting masks as a GANs game framework: A segmentation network generates the masks, and a discriminator network decides on the quality of the masks. To demonstrate this game, we show effective modifications on …
The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；Murdoch University（莫道克大学）；Hong Kong University of Sciences and Technology（香港科技大学）；The University of Western Australia（西澳大学）
Semantic segmentation is a challenging task in the absence of densely labelled data. Only relying on class activation maps (CAM) with image-level labels provides deficient segmentation supervision. Prior works thus consider pre-trained models to produce coarse saliency maps to guide the generation of pseudo segmentation labels. However, the commonly used off-line heuristic generation process cannot fully exploit the benefits of these coarse saliency maps. Motivated by the significant inter-task correlation, we propose a novel weakly supervised multi-task framework termed as AuxSegNet, to lever…
Leveraging Causal Reasoning Method for Explaining Medical Image Segmentation Models
Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Shenzhen University of Advanced Technology（深圳先进技术大学）；Shenzhen Polytechnic University（深圳职业技术大学）；University of Macau（澳门大学）；Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）
Most of the approaches for indoor RGBD semantic la- beling focus on using pixels or superpixels to train a classi- fier. In this paper, we implement a higher level segmentation using a hierarchy of superpixels to obtain a better segmen- tation for training our classifier. By focusing on meaningful segments that conform more directly to objects, regardless of size, we train a random forest of decision trees as a clas- sifier using simple features such as the 3D size, LAB color histogram, width, height, and shape as specified by a his- togram of surface normals. We test our method on the NYU V2 …
National Center for Tumor Diseases (NCT)（国家肿瘤疾病中心（NCT））；TU Dresden（德累斯顿工业大学）；Technische Universität Dresden（德累斯顿工业大学）
Estimating the remaining surgery duration (RSD) during surgical procedures can be useful for OR planning and anesthesia dose estimation. With the recent success of deep learning-based methods in computer vision, several neural network approaches have been proposed for fully automatic RSD prediction based solely on visual data from the endoscopic camera. We investigate whether RSD prediction can be improved using unsupervised temporal video segmentation as an auxiliary learning task. As opposed to previous work, which presented supervised surgical phase recognition as auxiliary task, we avoid t…
Semi-supervised segmentation tackles the scarcity of annotations by leveraging unlabeled data with a small amount of labeled data. A prominent way to utilize the unlabeled data is by consistency training which commonly uses a teacher-student network, where a teacher guides a student segmentation. The predictions of unlabeled data are not reliable, therefore, uncertainty-aware methods have been proposed to gradually learn from meaningful and reliable predictions. Uncertainty estimation, however, relies on multiple inferences from model predictions that need to be computed for each training step…
Predicting facial attributes from faces in the wild is very challenging due to pose and lighting variations in the real world. The key to this problem is to build proper feature representations to cope with these unfavourable conditions. Given the success of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) in image classification, the high-level CNN feature, as an intuitive and reasonable choice, has been widely utilized for this problem. In this paper, however, we consider the mid-level CNN features as an alternative to the high-level ones for attribute prediction. This is based on the observation that fac…
Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R), the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR)（资讯通信研究院（I2R），新加坡科技研究局（A*STAR））；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）
In industrial product quality assessment, it is essential to determine whether a product is defect-free and further analyze the severity of anomality. To this end, accurate defect segmentation on images of products provides an important functionality. In industrial inspection tasks, it is common to capture abundant defect-free image samples but very limited anomalous ones. Therefore, it is critical to develop automatic and accurate defect segmentation systems using only a small number of annotated anomalous training images. This paper tackles the challenging few-shot defect segmentation task w…
Technical Report for ICRA 2025 GOOSE 2D Semantic Segmentation Challenge: Leveraging Color Shift Correction, RoPE-Swin Backbone, and Quantile-based Label Denoising Strategy for Robust Outdoor Scene Understanding
Institute of Intelligent Systems（智能系统研究所）；College of Artificial Intelligence, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University（人工智能学院，阳明交通大学）；Institute of Data Science, National Cheng Kung University（数据科学研究所，成功大学）
Dramatic demand for manpower to label pixel-level annotations triggered the advent of unsupervised semantic segmentation. Although the recent work employing the vision transformer (ViT) backbone shows exceptional performance, there is still a lack of consideration for task-specific training guidance and local semantic consistency. To tackle these issues, we leverage contrastive learning by excavating hidden positives to learn rich semantic relationships and ensure semantic consistency in local regions. Specifically, we first discover two types of global hidden positives, task-agnostic and task…
Finnish Geospatial Research Institute FGI, National Land Survey of Finland（芬兰国家土地调查局芬兰地理空间研究所）；Aalto University（阿尔托大学）
Robustness of different pattern recognition methods is one of the key challenges in autonomous driving, especially when driving in the high variety of road environments and weather conditions, such as gravel roads and snowfall. Although one can collect data from these adverse conditions using cars equipped with sensors, it is quite tedious to annotate the data for training. In this work, we address this limitation and propose a CNN-based method that can leverage the steering wheel angle information to improve the road area semantic segmentation. As the steering wheel angle data can be easily a…
