Medical image computing has advanced rapidly with the advent of deep learning techniques such as convolutional neural networks. Deep convolutional neural networks can perform exceedingly well given full supervision. However, the success of such fully-supervised models for various image analysis tasks (e.g., anatomy or lesion segmentation from medical images) is limited to the availability of massive amounts of labeled data. Given small sample sizes, such models are prohibitively data biased with large domain shift. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel end-to-end medical image segmentation model, namely Progressive Adversarial Semantic Segmentation (PASS), which can make improved segmentation predictions without requiring any domain-specific data during training time. Our extensive experimentation with 8 public diabetic retinopathy and chest X-ray datasets, confirms the effectiveness of PASS for accurate vascular and pulmonary segmentation, both for in-domain and cross-domain evaluations.
University of Munich（慕尼黑大学）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）
Deep neural network-based image classification can be misled by adversarial examples with small and quasi-imperceptible perturbations. Furthermore, the adversarial examples created on one classification model can also fool another different model. The transferability of the adversarial examples has recently attracted a growing interest since it makes black-box attacks on classification models feasible. As an extension of classification, semantic segmentation has also received much attention towards its adversarial robustness. However, the transferability of adversarial examples on segmentation…
Indian Statistical Institute（印度统计研究所）；Østfold University College（东福尔大学学院）；SimulaMet；UiT The Arctic University of Norway（挪威北极大学）；Oslo Metropolitan University（奥斯陆城市大学）
Medical image segmentation can provide detailed information for clinical analysis which can be useful for scenarios where the detailed location of a finding is important. Knowing the location of disease can play a vital role in treatment and decision-making. Convolutional neural network (CNN) based encoder-decoder techniques have advanced the performance of automated medical image segmentation systems. Several such CNN-based methodologies utilize techniques such as spatial- and channel-wise attention to enhance performance. Another technique that has drawn attention in recent years is residual…
Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；Deepwise AI Lab（深智云人工智能实验室）
Recent progress in biomedical image segmentation based on deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) has drawn much attention. However, its vulnerability towards adversarial samples cannot be overlooked. This paper is the first one that discovers that all the CNN-based state-of-the-art biomedical image segmentation models are sensitive to adversarial perturbations. This limits the deployment of these methods in safety-critical biomedical fields. In this paper, we discover that global spatial dependencies and global contextual information in a biomedical image can be exploited to defend against …
As one of the fundamental tasks in computer vision, semantic segmentation plays an important role in real world applications. Although numerous deep learning models have made notable progress on several mainstream datasets with the rapid development of convolutional networks, they still encounter various challenges in practical scenarios. Unsupervised adaptive semantic segmentation aims to obtain a robust classifier trained with source domain data, which is able to maintain stable performance when deployed to a target domain with different data distribution. In this paper, we propose an innova…
We propose three segmentation methods using GAN and information leakage between generator and discriminator. First, we propose an Adversarial Training Attention Module (ATA-Module) that uses an attention mechanism from the discriminator to the generator to enhance and leak important information in the discriminator. ATA-Module transmits important information to the generator from the discriminator. Second, we propose a Top-Down Pixel-wise Difficulty Attention Module (Top-Down PDA-Module) that leaks an attention map based on pixel-wise difficulty in the generator to the discriminator. The gener…
Singapore University of Technology and Design（新加坡科技设计大学）；The University of Tokyo（东京大学）；Deakin University（迪肯大学）；Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
The widespread adoption of autonomous systems such as drones and assistant robots has created a need for real-time high-quality semantic scene segmentation. In this paper, we propose an efficient yet robust technique for on-the-fly dense reconstruction and semantic segmentation of 3D indoor scenes. To guarantee (near) real-time performance, our method is built atop an efficient super-voxel clustering method and a conditional random field with higher-order constraints from structural and object cues, enabling progressive dense semantic segmentation without any precomputation. We extensively eva…
Even though deep neural networks succeed on many different tasks including semantic segmentation, they lack on robustness against adversarial examples. To counteract this exploit, often adversarial training is used. However, it is known that adversarial training with weak adversarial attacks (e.g. using the Fast Gradient Method) does not improve the robustness against stronger attacks. Recent research shows that it is possible to increase the robustness of such single-step methods by choosing an appropriate step size during the training. Finding such a step size, without increasing the computa…
Facebook AI Research（Facebook 人工智能研究院）；INRIA（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；Laboratoire Jean Kuntzmann（让·昆兹曼实验室）
Adversarial training has been shown to produce state of the art results for generative image modeling. In this paper we propose an adversarial training approach to train semantic segmentation models. We train a convolutional semantic segmentation network along with an adversarial network that discriminates segmentation maps coming either from the ground truth or from the segmentation network. The motivation for our approach is that it can detect and correct higher-order inconsistencies between ground truth segmentation maps and the ones produced by the segmentation net. Our experiments show th…
Progressive Prompt-Guided Cross-Modal Reasoning for Referring Image Segmentation
School of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, Wuhan University of Technology（武汉理工大学计算机科学与人工智能学院）；School of Artificial Intelligence and Automation, Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学人工智能与自动化学院）；University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；Wuhan Vocational College of Software and Engineering（武汉软件工程职业学院）
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Eastern Institute for Advanced Study（东方理工高等研究院）；Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）
Few-shot semantic segmentation task aims at performing segmentation in query images with a few annotated support samples. Currently, few-shot segmentation methods mainly focus on leveraging foreground information without fully utilizing the rich background information, which could result in wrong activation of foreground-like background regions with the inadaptability to dramatic scene changes of support-query image pairs. Meanwhile, the lack of detail mining mechanism could cause coarse parsing results without some semantic components or edge areas since prototypes have limited ability to cop…
Most of the existing semantic segmentation approaches with image-level class labels as supervision, highly rely on the initial class activation map (CAM) generated from the standard classification network. In this paper, a novel "Progressive Patch Learning" approach is proposed to improve the local details extraction of the classification, producing the CAM better covering the whole object rather than only the most discriminative regions as in CAMs obtained in conventional classification models. "Patch Learning" destructs the feature maps into patches and independently processes each local pat…
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；Institute for AI Industry Research (AIR), Tsinghua University（清华大学人工智能产业研究院（AIR））；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）
Pseudo supervision is regarded as the core idea in semi-supervised learning for semantic segmentation, and there is always a tradeoff between utilizing only the high-quality pseudo labels and leveraging all the pseudo labels. Addressing that, we propose a novel learning approach, called Conservative-Progressive Collaborative Learning (CPCL), among which two predictive networks are trained in parallel, and the pseudo supervision is implemented based on both the agreement and disagreement of the two predictions. One network seeks common ground via intersection supervision and is supervised by th…
Recurrent Generic Contour-based Instance Segmentation with Progressive Learning
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Zhangjiang Laboratory（张江实验室）；The University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）；Australian Institute for Machine Learning（澳大利亚机器学习研究所）
Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；SenseTime Group Limited（商汤集团有限公司）
This paper introduces Progressively Diffused Networks (PDNs) for unifying multi-scale context modeling with deep feature learning, by taking semantic image segmentation as an exemplar application. Prior neural networks, such as ResNet, tend to enhance representational power by increasing the depth of architectures and driving the training objective across layers. However, we argue that spatial dependencies in different layers, which generally represent the rich contexts among data elements, are also critical to building deep and discriminative representations. To this end, our PDNs enables to …
University of Central Florida（中佛罗里达大学）；Mayo Clinic Cancer Center（妙佑医疗国际癌症中心）
Adversarial learning has been proven to be effective for capturing long-range and high-level label consistencies in semantic segmentation. Unique to medical imaging, capturing 3D semantics in an effective yet computationally efficient way remains an open problem. In this study, we address this computational burden by proposing a novel projective adversarial network, called PAN, which incorporates high-level 3D information through 2D projections. Furthermore, we introduce an attention module into our framework that helps for a selective integration of global information directly from our segmen…
Multi-scale learning frameworks have been regarded as a capable class of models to boost semantic segmentation. The problem nevertheless is not trivial especially for the real-world deployments, which often demand high efficiency in inference latency. In this paper, we thoroughly analyze the design of convolutional blocks (the type of convolutions and the number of channels in convolutions), and the ways of interactions across multiple scales, all from lightweight standpoint for semantic segmentation. With such in-depth comparisons, we conclude three principles, and accordingly devise Lightwei…
Univ. Bordeaux（波尔多大学）；Bordeaux INP（波尔多国立高等综合理工学院）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；LaBRI（波尔多计算机科学实验室）；IMB（波尔多数学研究所）；ITACA（信息与通信技术应用研究所）；Universitat Politècnica de València（瓦伦西亚理工大学）
Semi-supervised learning (SSL) uses unlabeled data to compensate for the scarcity of annotated images and the lack of method generalization to unseen domains, two usual problems in medical segmentation tasks. In this work, we propose POPCORN, a novel method combining consistency regularization and pseudo-labeling designed for image segmentation. The proposed framework uses high-level regularization to constrain our segmentation model to use similar latent features for images with similar segmentations. POPCORN estimates a proximity graph to select data from easiest ones to more difficult ones,…
We develop and approach to unsupervised semantic medical image segmentation that extends previous work with generative adversarial networks. We use existing edge detection methods to construct simple edge diagrams, train a generative model to convert them into synthetic medical images, and construct a dataset of synthetic images with known segmentations using variations on extracted edge diagrams. This synthetic dataset is then used to train a supervised image segmentation model. We test our approach on a clinical dataset of kidney ultrasound images and the benchmark ISIC 2018 skin lesion data…
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；SmartMore（思谋科技）
Adversarial training is promising for improving robustness of deep neural networks towards adversarial perturbations, especially on the classification task. The effect of this type of training on semantic segmentation, contrarily, just commences. We make the initial attempt to explore the defense strategy on semantic segmentation by formulating a general adversarial training procedure that can perform decently on both adversarial and clean samples. We propose a dynamic divide-and-conquer adversarial training (DDC-AT) strategy to enhance the defense effect, by setting additional branches in the…
Due to the inherent robustness of segmentation models, traditional norm-bounded attack methods show limited effect on such type of models. In this paper, we focus on generating unrestricted adversarial examples for semantic segmentation models. We demonstrate a simple and effective method to generate unrestricted adversarial examples using conditional generative adversarial networks (CGAN) without any hand-crafted metric. The naïve implementation of CGAN, however, yields inferior image quality and low attack success rate. Instead, we leverage the SPADE (Spatially-adaptive denormalization) stru…
Deep learning algorithms have recently achieved promising deraining performances on both the natural and synthetic rainy datasets. As an essential low-level pre-processing stage, a deraining network should clear the rain streaks and preserve the fine semantic details. However, most existing methods only consider low-level image restoration. That limits their performances at high-level tasks requiring precise semantic information. To address this issue, in this paper, we present a segmentation-aware progressive network (SAPNet) based upon contrastive learning for single image deraining. We star…
Semantic segmentation is one of the basic topics in computer vision, it aims to assign semantic labels to every pixel of an image. Unbalanced semantic label distribution could have a negative influence on segmentation accuracy. In this paper, we investigate using data augmentation approach to balance the semantic label distribution in order to improve segmentation performance. We propose using generative adversarial networks (GANs) to generate realistic images for improving the performance of semantic segmentation networks. Experimental results show that the proposed method can not only improv…
Shell Global Solutions International B.V.（壳牌全球解决方案国际有限公司）
Semantic segmentation is one of the most fundamental problems in computer vision with significant impact on a wide variety of applications. Adversarial learning is shown to be an effective approach for improving semantic segmentation quality by enforcing higher-level pixel correlations and structural information. However, state-of-the-art semantic segmentation models cannot be easily plugged into an adversarial setting because they are not designed to accommodate convergence and stability issues in adversarial networks. We bridge this gap by building a conditional adversarial network with a st…
Hebei University of Technology（河北工业大学）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）
Deep learning based semi-supervised learning (SSL) methods have achieved strong performance in medical image segmentation, which can alleviate doctors' expensive annotation by utilizing a large amount of unlabeled data. Unlike most existing semi-supervised learning methods, adversarial training based methods distinguish samples from different sources by learning the data distribution of the segmentation map, leading the segmenter to generate more accurate predictions. We argue that the current performance restrictions for such approaches are the problems of feature extraction and learning pref…
Ghent University（根特大学）；Ghent University Global Campus（根特大学全球校区）
Deep learning models, which are increasingly being used in the field of medical image analysis, come with a major security risk, namely, their vulnerability to adversarial examples. Adversarial examples are carefully crafted samples that force machine learning models to make mistakes during testing time. These malicious samples have been shown to be highly effective in misguiding classification tasks. However, research on the influence of adversarial examples on segmentation is significantly lacking. Given that a large portion of medical imaging problems are effectively segmentation problems, …
Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；City, University of London（伦敦城市大学）
Neural network-based approaches can achieve high accuracy in various medical image segmentation tasks. However, they generally require large labelled datasets for supervised learning. Acquiring and manually labelling a large medical dataset is expensive and sometimes impractical due to data sharing and privacy issues. In this work, we propose an adversarial data augmentation method for training neural networks for medical image segmentation. Instead of generating pixel-wise adversarial attacks, our model generates plausible and realistic signal corruptions, which models the intensity inhomogen…
Semi-supervised semantic segmentation focuses on the exploration of a small amount of labeled data and a large amount of unlabeled data, which is more in line with the demands of real-world image understanding applications. However, it is still hindered by the inability to fully and effectively leverage unlabeled images. In this paper, we reveal that cross-window consistency (CWC) is helpful in comprehensively extracting auxiliary supervision from unlabeled data. Additionally, we propose a novel CWC-driven progressive learning framework to optimize the deep network by mining weak-to-strong con…
The Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；UCLA（加州大学洛杉矶分校）；Baidu Research USA（百度研究院美国分部）
It has been well demonstrated that adversarial examples, i.e., natural images with visually imperceptible perturbations added, generally exist for deep networks to fail on image classification. In this paper, we extend adversarial examples to semantic segmentation and object detection which are much more difficult. Our observation is that both segmentation and detection are based on classifying multiple targets on an image (e.g., the basic target is a pixel or a receptive field in segmentation, and an object proposal in detection), which inspires us to optimize a loss function over a set of pi…
Hasso Plattner Institute for Digital Engineering（哈索·普拉特纳数字工程研究院）
Automated medical image analysis has a significant value in diagnosis and treatment of lesions. Brain tumors segmentation has a special importance and difficulty due to the difference in appearances and shapes of the different tumor regions in magnetic resonance images. Additionally, the data sets are heterogeneous and usually limited in size in comparison with the computer vision problems. The recently proposed adversarial training has shown promising results in generative image modeling. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end trainable architecture for brain tumor semantic segmentation…
Segmentation of images is a long-standing challenge in medical AI. This is mainly due to the fact that training a neural network to perform image segmentation requires a significant number of pixel-level annotated data, which is often unavailable. To address this issue, we propose a semi-supervised image segmentation technique based on the concept of multi-view learning. In contrast to the previous art, we introduce an adversarial form of dual-view training and employ a critic to formulate the learning problem in multi-view training as a min-max problem. Thorough quantitative and qualitative e…
Currently, Segmentation of bitewing radiograpy images is a very challenging task. The focus of the study is to segment it into caries, enamel, dentin, pulp, crowns, restoration and root canal treatments. The main method of semantic segmentation of bitewing radiograpy images at this stage is the U-shaped deep convolution neural network, but its accuracy is low. in order to improve the accuracy of semantic segmentation of bitewing radiograpy images, this paper proposes the use of Conditional Generative Adversarial network (cGAN) combined with U-shaped network structure (U-Net) approach to semant…
University of Pittsburgh（匹兹堡大学）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；The University of Melbourne（墨尔本大学）
An organ segmentation method that can generalize to unseen contrasts and scanner settings can significantly reduce the need for retraining of deep learning models. Domain Generalization (DG) aims to achieve this goal. However, most DG methods for segmentation require training data from multiple domains during training. We propose a novel adversarial domain generalization method for organ segmentation trained on data from a \emph{single} domain. We synthesize the new domains via learning an adversarial domain synthesizer (ADS) and presume that the synthetic domains cover a large enough area of …
Nowadays, Deep learning techniques show dramatic performance on computer vision area, and they even outperform human. But it is also vulnerable to some small perturbation called an adversarial attack. This is a problem combined with the safety of artificial intelligence, which has recently been studied a lot. These attacks have shown that they can fool models of image classification, semantic segmentation, and object detection. We point out this attack can be protected by denoise autoencoder, which is used for denoising the perturbation and restoring the original images. We experiment with var…
VinAI Research（VinAI研究院）；VinUniversity（Vin大学）；University of Arkansas（阿肯色大学）；Stony Brook University（石溪大学）
The objective of this work is to segment high-resolution images without overloading GPU memory usage or losing the fine details in the output segmentation map. The memory constraint means that we must either downsample the big image or divide the image into local patches for separate processing. However, the former approach would lose the fine details, while the latter can be ambiguous due to the lack of a global picture. In this work, we present MagNet, a multi-scale framework that resolves local ambiguity by looking at the image at multiple magnification levels. MagNet has multiple processin…
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；CMU（卡内基梅隆大学）；Nankai University（南开大学）；Beijing Jiaotong University（北京交通大学）；AI Institute（360人工智能研究院）
We investigate a principle way to progressively mine discriminative object regions using classification networks to address the weakly-supervised semantic segmentation problems. Classification networks are only responsive to small and sparse discriminative regions from the object of interest, which deviates from the requirement of the segmentation task that needs to localize dense, interior and integral regions for pixel-wise inference. To mitigate this gap, we propose a new adversarial erasing approach for localizing and expanding object regions progressively. Starting with a single small obj…
Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have demonstrated exceptional performance on most recognition tasks such as image classification and segmentation. However, they have also been shown to be vulnerable to adversarial examples. This phenomenon has recently attracted a lot of attention but it has not been extensively studied on multiple, large-scale datasets and structured prediction tasks such as semantic segmentation which often require more specialised networks with additional components such as CRFs, dilated convolutions, skip-connections and multiscale processing. In this paper, we present what to…
AmirKabir University of Technology（阿米尔卡比尔理工大学）；Sharif University of Technology（谢里夫理工大学）；Monash University（莫纳什大学）
Semantic segmentation is one of the basic, yet essential scene understanding tasks for an autonomous agent. The recent developments in supervised machine learning and neural networks have enjoyed great success in enhancing the performance of the state-of-the-art techniques for this task. However, their superior performance is highly reliant on the availability of a large-scale annotated dataset. In this paper, we propose a novel fully unsupervised semantic segmentation method, the so-called Information Maximization and Adversarial Regularization Segmentation (InMARS). Inspired by human percept…
TranSegPGD: Improving Transferability of Adversarial Examples on Semantic Segmentation
Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Yanshan University（燕山大学）；Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR)（新加坡科技研究局）；Shenzhen Campus of Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学深圳校区）
Adversarial training has been recently employed for realizing structured semantic segmentation, in which the aim is to preserve higher-level scene structural consistencies in dense predictions. However, as we show, value-based discrimination between the predictions from the segmentation network and ground-truth annotations can hinder the training process from learning to improve structural qualities as well as disabling the network from properly expressing uncertainties. In this paper, we rethink adversarial training for semantic segmentation and propose to formulate the fake/real discriminati…
PBE-UNet: A light weight Progressive Boundary-Enhanced U-Net with Scale-Aware Aggregation for Ultrasound Image Segmentation
Department of Computer Science, Shaoxing University（绍兴大学计算机科学系）；National Frontiers Science Center for Industrial Intelligence and Systems Optimization, Northeastern University（工业智能化与系统优化国家级前沿科学中心，东北大学）；College of Computer Science, Chongqing University（重庆大学计算机学院）；School of Computer and Computing Science, Hangzhou City University（杭州市大学计算机与计算科学学院）；ZJU-UIUC Institute, Zhejiang University（浙江大学ZJU-UIUC研究院）；Information Technology R&D Innovation Center of Peking University（北京大学信息技术研发创新中心）
South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）；Key Laboratory of Big Data and Intelligent Robot, Ministry of Education（教育部大数据与智能机器人重点实验室）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Pazhou Lab（琶洲实验室）
Weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS), which aims to mine the object regions by merely using class-level labels, is a challenging task in computer vision. The current state-of-the-art CNN-based methods usually adopt Class-Activation-Maps (CAMs) to highlight the potential areas of the object, however, they may suffer from the part-activated issues. To this end, we try an early attempt to explore the global feature attention mechanism of vision transformer in WSSS task. However, since the transformer lacks the inductive bias as in CNN models, it can not boost the performance directly an…
