Convolutional neural networks have become state-of-the-art in a wide range of image recognition tasks. The interpretation of their predictions, however, is an active area of research. Whereas various interpretation methods have been suggested for image classification, the interpretation of image segmentation still remains largely unexplored. To that end, we propose SEG-GRAD-CAM, a gradient-based method for interpreting semantic segmentation. Our method is an extension of the widely-used Grad-CAM method, applied locally to produce heatmaps showing the relevance of individual pixels for semantic segmentation.
Leipzig University（莱比锡大学）；Leipzig University Medical Centre（莱比锡大学医学中心）
The sigmoid activation is the standard output activation function in binary classification and segmentation with neural networks. Still, there exist a variety of other potential output activation functions, which may lead to improved results in medical image segmentation. In this work, we consider how the asymptotic behavior of different output activation and loss functions affects the prediction probabilities and the corresponding segmentation errors. For cross entropy, we show that a faster rate of change of the activation function correlates with better predictions, while a slower rate of c…
Recent mainstream weakly-supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) approaches mainly relies on image-level classification learning, which has limited representation capacity. In this paper, we propose a novel semantic learning based framework, named SLAMs (Semantic Learning based Activation Map), for WSSS.
Recent mainstream weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) approaches are mainly based on Class Activation Map (CAM) generated by a CNN (Convolutional Neural Network) based image classifier. In this paper, we propose a novel transformer-based framework, named Semantic Guided Activation Transformer (SemFormer), for WSSS. We design a transformer-based Class-Aware AutoEncoder (CAAE) to extract the class embeddings for the input image and learn class semantics for all classes of the dataset. The class embeddings and learned class semantics are then used to guide the generation of activation …
Huazhong University of Science & Technology（华中科技大学）；Horizon Robotics（地平线机器人）；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）
In this paper, we propose a conceptually novel, efficient, and fully convolutional framework for real-time instance segmentation. Previously, most instance segmentation methods heavily rely on object detection and perform mask prediction based on bounding boxes or dense centers. In contrast, we propose a sparse set of instance activation maps, as a new object representation, to highlight informative regions for each foreground object. Then instance-level features are obtained by aggregating features according to the highlighted regions for recognition and segmentation. Moreover, based on bipar…
For many biological image segmentation tasks, including topological knowledge, such as the nesting of classes, can greatly improve results. However, most `out-of-the-box' CNN models are still blind to such prior information. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to encode this information, through a multi-level activation layer and three compatible losses. We benchmark all of them on nuclei segmentation in bright-field microscopy cell images from the 2018 Data Science Bowl challenge, offering an exemplary segmentation task with cells and nested subcellular structures. Our scheme greatly s…
Lancaster University（兰卡斯特大学）；European Space Agency（欧洲空间局）
Earth observation is fundamental for a range of human activities including flood response as it offers vital information to decision makers. Semantic segmentation plays a key role in mapping the raw hyper-spectral data coming from the satellites into a human understandable form assigning class labels to each pixel. In this paper, we introduce a prototype-based interpretable deep semantic segmentation (IDSS) method, which is highly accurate as well as interpretable. Its parameters are in orders of magnitude less than the number of parameters used by deep networks such as U-Net and are clearly i…
KU Leuven（鲁汶大学）；Université Claude-Bernard Lyon 1（里昂第一大学）；icometrix；KU Leuven Kulak（鲁汶大学库拉克校区）
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) with U-shaped architectures have dominated medical image segmentation, which is crucial for various clinical purposes. However, the inherent locality of convolution makes CNNs fail to fully exploit global context, essential for better recognition of some structures, e.g., brain lesions. Transformers have recently proven promising performance on vision tasks, including semantic segmentation, mainly due to their capability of modeling long-range dependencies. Nevertheless, the quadratic complexity of attention makes existing Transformer-based models use self-…
The success of supervised deep learning models in medical image segmentation relies on detailed annotations. However, labor-intensive manual labeling is costly and inefficient, especially in dense object segmentation. To this end, we propose a self-supervised learning based approach with a Prior Self-activation Module (PSM) that generates self-activation maps from the input images to avoid labeling costs and further produce pseudo masks for the downstream task. To be specific, we firstly train a neural network using self-supervised learning and utilize the gradient information in the shallow l…
Weakly-supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) has recently gained much attention for its promise to train segmentation models only with image-level labels. Existing WSSS methods commonly argue that the sparse coverage of CAM incurs the performance bottleneck of WSSS. This paper provides analytical and empirical evidence that the actual bottleneck may not be sparse coverage but a global thresholding scheme applied after CAM. Then, we show that this issue can be mitigated by satisfying two conditions; 1) reducing the imbalance in the foreground activation and 2) increasing the gap between the f…
Fully supervised semantic segmentation learns from dense masks, which requires heavy annotation cost for closed set. In this paper, we use natural language as supervision without any pixel-level annotation for open world segmentation. We call the proposed framework as FreeSeg, where the mask is freely available from raw feature map of pretraining model. Compared with zero-shot or openset segmentation, FreeSeg doesn't require any annotated masks, and it widely predicts categories beyond class-agnostic unsupervised segmentation. Specifically, FreeSeg obtains free mask from Image-Text Similarity …
Shandong University（山东大学）；Institute of Tsinghua-Berkeley Shenzhen, Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School（清华大学深圳国际研究生院清华-伯克利深圳学院）；Hangzhou Dianzi University（杭州电子科技大学）；Shenzhen ZNV Technology Co., Ltd（深圳中兴网信科技有限公司）；Shenzhen Graduate School of Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学深圳研究生院）；Institute of Biopharmaceutical and Health Engineering, Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School（清华大学深圳国际研究生院生物医药与健康工程研究院）
Deep learning techniques have shown great potential in medical image processing, particularly through accurate and reliable image segmentation on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans or computed tomography (CT) scans, which allow the localization and diagnosis of lesions. However, training these segmentation models requires a large number of manually annotated pixel-level labels, which are time-consuming and labor-intensive, in contrast to image-level labels that are easier to obtain. It is imperative to resolve this problem through weakly-supervised semantic segmentation models using image-…
Image-level weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) is a fundamental yet challenging computer vision task facilitating scene understanding and automatic driving. Most existing methods resort to classification-based Class Activation Maps (CAMs) to play as the initial pseudo labels, which tend to focus on the discriminative image regions and lack customized characteristics for the segmentation task. To alleviate this issue, we propose a novel activation modulation and recalibration (AMR) scheme, which leverages a spotlight branch and a compensation branch to obtain weighted CAMs that can …
Shenzhen University（深圳大学）；Wenzhou-Kean University（温州肯恩大学）；Shenzhen Institute of Artificial Intelligence of Robotics of Society（深圳市人工智能与机器人研究院）
While class activation map (CAM) generated by image classification network has been widely used for weakly supervised object localization (WSOL) and semantic segmentation (WSSS), such classifiers usually focus on discriminative object regions. In this paper, we propose Contrastive learning for Class-agnostic Activation Map (C$^2$AM) generation only using unlabeled image data, without the involvement of image-level supervision. The core idea comes from the observation that i) semantic information of foreground objects usually differs from their backgrounds; ii) foreground objects with similar a…
Due to the cross-domain distribution shift aroused from diverse medical imaging systems, many deep learning segmentation methods fail to perform well on unseen data, which limits their real-world applicability. Recent works have shown the benefits of extracting domain-invariant representations on domain generalization. However, the interpretability of domain-invariant features remains a great challenge. To address this problem, we propose an interpretable Bayesian framework (BayeSeg) through Bayesian modeling of image and label statistics to enhance model generalizability for medical image seg…
Grid AI；University of California San Diego（加州大学圣迭戈分校）；Tessella；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；OpenMined
Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are widely used for decision making in a myriad of critical applications, ranging from medical to societal and even judicial. Given the importance of these decisions, it is crucial for us to be able to interpret these models. We introduce a new method for interpreting image segmentation models by learning regions of images in which noise can be applied without hindering downstream model performance. We apply this method to segmentation of the pancreas in CT scans, and qualitatively compare the quality of the method to existing explainability techniques, such as Grad…
Università di Bologna（博洛尼亚大学）；University of Padua（帕多瓦大学）
Semantic segmentation has a wide array of applications ranging from medical-image analysis, scene understanding, autonomous driving and robotic navigation. This work deals with medical image segmentation and in particular with accurate polyp detection and segmentation during colonoscopy examinations. Several convolutional neural network architectures have been proposed to effectively deal with this task and with the problem of segmenting objects at different scale input. The basic architecture in image segmentation consists of an encoder and a decoder: the first uses convolutional filters to e…
Shanghai University（上海大学）；Shanghai Institute for Advanced Communication and Data Science（上海先进通信与数据科学研究院）
Semantic segmentation is important for scene understanding. To address the scenes of adverse illumination conditions of natural images, thermal infrared (TIR) images are introduced. Most existing RGB-T semantic segmentation methods follow three cross-modal fusion paradigms, i.e. encoder fusion, decoder fusion, and feature fusion. Some methods, unfortunately, ignore the properties of RGB and TIR features or the properties of features at different levels. In this paper, we propose a novel feature fusion-based network for RGB-T semantic segmentation, named \emph{LASNet}, which follows three steps…
Uncertainty-Supervised Interpretable and Robust Evidential Segmentation
School of Data Science, Fudan University, Shanghai, China（复旦大学数据科学学院）；Institute of Science and Technology for Brain-inspired intelligence, Fudan University, Shanghai, China（复旦大学脑启发式智能技术研究所）；Nuffield Department of Population Health, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK（牛津大学人口健康牛津部门）
GUMP-Net: An interpretable model-data-driven intelligent algorithm for multi-class pelvic segmentation
State Key Laboratory of Mathematical Sciences, Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences（数学科学国家重点实验室，数学与系统科学研究院，中国科学院）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Department of Orthopedics, The Fourth Medical Center of Chinese PLA General Hospital（中国人民解放军第四医学中心骨科部）；National Clinical Research Center for Orthopedics, Sports Medicine and Rehabilitation（骨科、运动医学与康复临床研究中心）；Department of Trauma and Orthopedics, People’s Hospital Peking University（北京大学人民医院创伤与骨科部）；Department of Orthopedics and Traumatology, Beijing Jishuitan Hospital, Capital Medical University（首都医科大学北京积水潭医院骨科与创伤科）
Extracting class activation maps (CAM) is a key step for weakly-supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS). The CAM of convolution neural networks fails to capture long-range feature dependency on the image and result in the coverage on only foreground object parts, i.e., a lot of false negatives. An intuitive solution is ``coupling'' the CAM with the long-range attention matrix of visual transformers (ViT) We find that the direct ``coupling'', e.g., pixel-wise multiplication of attention and activation, achieves a more global coverage (on the foreground), but unfortunately goes with a great incr…
Image-level weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) relies on class activation maps (CAMs) for pseudo labels generation. As CAMs only highlight the most discriminative regions of objects, the generated pseudo labels are usually unsatisfactory to serve directly as supervision. To solve this, most existing approaches follow a multi-training pipeline to refine CAMs for better pseudo-labels, which includes: 1) re-training the classification model to generate CAMs; 2) post-processing CAMs to obtain pseudo labels; and 3) training a semantic segmentation model with the obtained pseudo labels. …
In recent years novel activation functions have been proposed to improve the performance of neural networks, and they show superior performance compared to the ReLU counterpart. However, there are environments, where the availability of complex activations is limited, and usually only the ReLU is supported. In this paper we propose methods that can be used to improve the performance of ReLU networks by using these efficient novel activations during model training. More specifically, we propose ensemble activations that are composed of the ReLU and one of these novel activations. Furthermore, t…
Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；SenseTime（商汤科技）
Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation (WSSS) is challenging, particularly when image-level labels are used to supervise pixel level prediction. To bridge their gap, a Class Activation Map (CAM) is usually generated to provide pixel level pseudo labels. CAMs in Convolutional Neural Networks suffer from partial activation ie, only the most discriminative regions are activated. Transformer based methods, on the other hand, are highly effective at exploring global context with long range dependency modeling, potentially alleviating the "partial activation" issue. In this paper, we propose the fi…
Background Activation Suppression for Weakly Supervised Object Localization and Semantic Segmentation
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center（合肥综合性国家科学中心人工智能研究院）
Matching-Based Few-Shot Semantic Segmentation Models Are Interpretable by Design
Department of Computer Science, University of Bari Aldo Moro（巴里大学计算机科学系）；Jheronimus Academy of Data Science (JADS)（赫尔蒙尼数据科学学院）；Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e)（埃因霍温理工大学）
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…
Principle-Guided Supervision for Interpretable Uncertainty in Medical Image Segmentation
School of Data Science, Fudan University（复旦大学数据科学学院）；Institute of Science and Technology for Brain-Inspired Intelligence, Fudan University（复旦大学脑启发智能科学研究院）；National Heart and Lung Institute, Imperial College London（伦敦帝国理工学院国家心脏和肺研究所）
Computer Vision Laboratory, ETH Zürich（苏黎世联邦理工学院计算机视觉实验室）
Quantifying segmentation uncertainty has become an important issue in medical image analysis due to the inherent ambiguity of anatomical structures and its pathologies. Recently, neural network-based uncertainty quantification methods have been successfully applied to various problems. One of the main limitations of the existing techniques is the high memory requirement during training; which limits their application to processing smaller field-of-views (FOVs) and/or using shallower architectures. In this paper, we investigate the effect of using reversible blocks for building memory-efficient…
Extracting class activation maps (CAM) is arguably the most standard step of generating pseudo masks for weakly-supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS). Yet, we find that the crux of the unsatisfactory pseudo masks is the binary cross-entropy loss (BCE) widely used in CAM. Specifically, due to the sum-over-class pooling nature of BCE, each pixel in CAM may be responsive to multiple classes co-occurring in the same receptive field. As a result, given a class, its hot CAM pixels may wrongly invade the area belonging to other classes, or the non-hot ones may be actually a part of the class. To th…
Weakly supervised semantic segmentation produces pixel-level localization from class labels; however, a classifier trained on such labels is likely to focus on a small discriminative region of the target object. We interpret this phenomenon using the information bottleneck principle: the final layer of a deep neural network, activated by the sigmoid or softmax activation functions, causes an information bottleneck, and as a result, only a subset of the task-relevant information is passed on to the output. We first support this argument through a simulated toy experiment and then propose a meth…
Fully convolutional neural networks give accurate, per-pixel prediction for input images and have applications like semantic segmentation. However, a typical FCN usually requires lots of floating point computation and large run-time memory, which effectively limits its usability. We propose a method to train Bit Fully Convolution Network (BFCN), a fully convolutional neural network that has low bit-width weights and activations. Because most of its computation-intensive convolutions are accomplished between low bit-width numbers, a BFCN can be accelerated by an efficient bit-convolution implem…
Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；UC Santa Cruz（加州大学圣克鲁兹分校）
Batch normalization (BN) uniformly shifts and scales the activations based on the statistics of a batch of images. However, the intensity distribution of the background pixels often dominates the BN statistics because the background accounts for a large proportion of the entire image. This paper focuses on enhancing BN with the intensity distribution of foreground pixels, the one that really matters for image segmentation. We propose a new normalization strategy, named categorical normalization (CateNorm), to normalize the activations according to categorical statistics. The categorical statis…
Interpretable Probabilistic Medical Image Segmentation via Gaussian Process with Explicit Modelling of Annotation Bias and Variability
University College London（伦敦大学学院）；Queen Mary University of London（伦敦玛丽女王大学）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）；University College London Hospitals NHS Trust（伦敦大学学院医院NHS信托基金会）；Imperial College Healthcare（帝国理工学院医疗保健）
Institute of Microelectronics of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院微电子研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Deep learning achieves excellent performance in many domains, so we not only apply it to the navel orange semantic segmentation task to solve the two problems of distinguishing defect categories and identifying the stem end and blossom end, but also propose a fastidious attention mechanism to further improve model performance. This lightweight attention mechanism includes two learnable parameters, activations and thresholds, to capture long-range dependence. Specifically, the threshold picks out part of the spatial feature map and the activation excite this area. Based on activations and thres…
In this paper, we propose to employ semantic segmentation to improve person-related attribute prediction. The core idea lies in the fact that the probability of an attribute to appear in an image is far from being uniform in the spatial domain. We build our attribute prediction model jointly with a deep semantic segmentation network. This harnesses the localization cues learned by the semantic segmentation to guide the attention of the attribute prediction to the regions where different attributes naturally show up. Therefore, in addition to prediction, we are able to localize the attributes d…
College of Engineering and Computer Science（工程与计算机科学学院）；Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）
Compared with expensive pixel-wise annotations, image-level labels make it possible to learn semantic segmentation in a weakly-supervised manner. Within this pipeline, the class activation map (CAM) is obtained and further processed to serve as a pseudo label to train the semantic segmentation model in a fully-supervised manner. In this paper, we argue that the lost structure information in CAM limits its application in downstream semantic segmentation, leading to deteriorated predictions. Furthermore, the inconsistent class activation scores inside the same object contradicts the common sense…
