Large, fine-grained image segmentation datasets, annotated at pixel-level, are difficult to obtain, particularly in medical imaging, where annotations also require expert knowledge. Weakly-supervised learning can train models by relying on weaker forms of annotation, such as scribbles. Here, we learn to segment using scribble annotations in an adversarial game. With unpaired segmentation masks, we train a multi-scale GAN to generate realistic segmentation masks at multiple resolutions, while we use scribbles to learn their correct position in the image. Central to the model's success is a novel attention gating mechanism, which we condition with adversarial signals to act as a shape prior, resulting in better object localization at multiple scales. Subject to adversarial conditioning, the segmentor learns attention maps that are semantic, suppress the noisy activations outside the objects, and reduce the vanishing gradient problem in the deeper layers of the segmentor. We evaluated our model on several medical (ACDC, LVSC, CHAOS) and non-medical (PPSS) datasets, and we report performance levels matching those achieved by models trained with fully annotated segmentation masks. We also demonstrate extensions in a variety of settings: semi-supervised learning; combining multiple scribble sources (a crowdsourcing scenario) and multi-task learning (combining scribble and mask supervision). We release expert-made scribble annotations for the ACDC dataset, and the code used for the experiments, at https://vios-s.github.io/multiscale-adversarial-attention-gates
Recently, weakly-supervised image segmentation using weak annotations like scribbles has gained great attention, since such annotations are much easier to obtain compared to time-consuming and label-intensive labeling at the pixel/voxel level. However, because scribbles lack structure information of region of interest (ROI), existing scribble-based methods suffer from poor boundary localization. Furthermore, most current methods are designed for 2D image segmentation, which do not fully leverage the volumetric information if directly applied to image slices. In this paper, we propose a scribbl…
Large-scale data is of crucial importance for learning semantic segmentation models, but annotating per-pixel masks is a tedious and inefficient procedure. We note that for the topic of interactive image segmentation, scribbles are very widely used in academic research and commercial software, and are recognized as one of the most user-friendly ways of interacting. In this paper, we propose to use scribbles to annotate images, and develop an algorithm to train convolutional networks for semantic segmentation supervised by scribbles. Our algorithm is based on a graphical model that jointly prop…
Interactive segmentation enables users to extract masks by providing simple annotations to indicate the target, such as boxes, clicks, or scribbles. Among these interaction formats, scribbles are the most flexible as they can be of arbitrary shapes and sizes. This enables scribbles to provide more indications of the target object. However, previous works mainly focus on click-based configuration, and the scribble-based setting is rarely explored. In this work, we attempt to formulate a standard protocol for scribble-based interactive segmentation. Basically, we design diversified strategies to…
ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；MPI for Informatics（马克斯·普朗克信息学研究所）；KU Leuven（鲁汶大学）
Densely annotating LiDAR point clouds remains too expensive and time-consuming to keep up with the ever growing volume of data. While current literature focuses on fully-supervised performance, developing efficient methods that take advantage of realistic weak supervision have yet to be explored. In this paper, we propose using scribbles to annotate LiDAR point clouds and release ScribbleKITTI, the first scribble-annotated dataset for LiDAR semantic segmentation. Furthermore, we present a pipeline to reduce the performance gap that arises when using such weak annotations. Our pipeline comprise…
Scribble Hides Class: Promoting Scribble-Based Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation with Its Class Label
Institute of Medical University, Peking University（北京大学医学部）；National Biomedical Imaging Center, Peking University（北京大学生物医学成像中心）；Institute of Biomedical Engineering, Peking University Shenzhen Graduate School（北京大学深圳研究生院生物医学工程研究所）
Exploiting Inherent Class Label: Towards Robust Scribble Supervised Semantic Segmentation
Institute of Medical Technology, Peking University Health Science Center（北京大学医学部医学技术研究院）；Peking University（北京大学）；National Biomedical Imaging Center, Peking University（北京大学国家生物医学成像科学中心）；Peking University Shenzhen Graduate School（北京大学深圳研究生院）
Volumetric Medical Image Segmentation via Scribble Annotations and Shape Priors
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Ruijin Hospital, Shanghai Jiao Tong University of Medicine（上海交通大学医学院附属瑞金医院）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University of Medicine（上海交通大学医学院）
Curating a large scale fully-annotated dataset can be both labour-intensive and expertise-demanding, especially for medical images. To alleviate this problem, we propose to utilize solely scribble annotations for weakly supervised segmentation. Existing solutions mainly leverage selective losses computed solely on annotated areas and generate pseudo gold standard segmentation by propagating labels to adjacent areas. However, these methods could suffer from the inaccurate and sometimes unrealistic pseudo segmentation due to the insufficient supervision and incomplete shape features. Different f…
University of Maryland, College Park（马里兰大学帕克分校）；Alexandria University, Faculty of Engineering（亚历山大大学工程学院）
In this paper, we cast the scribble-based interactive image segmentation as a semi-supervised learning problem. Our novel approach alleviates the need to solve an expensive generalized eigenvector problem by approximating the eigenvectors using efficiently computed eigenfunctions. The smoothness operator defined on feature densities at the limit n tends to infinity recovers the exact eigenvectors of the graph Laplacian, where n is the number of nodes in the graph. To further reduce the computational complexity without scarifying our accuracy, we select pivots pixels from user annotations. In o…
Shandong University（山东大学）；AICFVE, Beijing Film Academy（北京电影学院AICFVE）；University of Leeds（利兹大学）
Scribble-supervised semantic segmentation has gained much attention recently for its promising performance without high-quality annotations. Due to the lack of supervision, confident and consistent predictions are usually hard to obtain. Typically, people handle these problems to either adopt an auxiliary task with the well-labeled dataset or incorporate the graphical model with additional requirements on scribble annotations. Instead, this work aims to achieve semantic segmentation by scribble annotations directly without extra information and other limitations. Specifically, we propose holis…
ZScribbleSeg: A comprehensive segmentation framework with modeling of efficient annotation and maximization of scribble supervision
School of Data Science, Fudan University, Shanghai, 200433, China（复旦大学数据科学学院）；Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA（约翰霍普金斯大学电气与计算机工程系）
Shandong University（山东大学）；AICFVE, Beijing Film Academy（北京电影学院AICFVE）
Scribble-supervised semantic segmentation has gained much attention recently for its promising performance without high-quality annotations. Many approaches have been proposed. Typically, they handle this problem to either introduce a well-labeled dataset from another related task, turn to iterative refinement and post-processing with the graphical model, or manipulate the scribble label. This work aims to achieve semantic segmentation supervised by scribble label directly without auxiliary information and other intermediate manipulation. Specifically, we impose diffusion on neural representat…
Curating a large set of fully annotated training data can be costly, especially for the tasks of medical image segmentation. Scribble, a weaker form of annotation, is more obtainable in practice, but training segmentation models from limited supervision of scribbles is still challenging. To address the difficulties, we propose a new framework for scribble learning-based medical image segmentation, which is composed of mix augmentation and cycle consistency and thus is referred to as CycleMix. For augmentation of supervision, CycleMix adopts the mixup strategy with a dedicated design of random …
From Few to More: Scribble-based Medical Image Segmentation via Masked Context Modeling and Continuous Pseudo Labels
National Engineering Laboratory for Integrated Aero-Space-Ground-Ocean Big Data Application Technology, School of Computer Science and Engineering, Northwestern Polytechnical University（集成空天地海大数据应用技术国家工程实验室，计算机科学与工程学院，西北工业大学）
Scribble-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation with Dynamic Teacher Switching and Hierarchical Consistency
1 Carnegie Mellon University, PA 15213, United States 2 PASSIO Lab, North Carolina A\&T State University, NC 27401, United States 3 University of Houston, TX 77004, United States 4 Northwestern University, IL 60611, United States
Road surface extraction from remote sensing images using deep learning methods has achieved good performance, while most of the existing methods are based on fully supervised learning, which requires a large amount of training data with laborious per-pixel annotation. In this paper, we propose a scribble-based weakly supervised road surface extraction method named ScRoadExtractor, which learns from easily accessible scribbles such as centerlines instead of densely annotated road surface ground-truths. To propagate semantic information from sparse scribbles to unlabeled pixels, we introduce a r…
We address interactive full image annotation, where the goal is to accurately segment all object and stuff regions in an image. We propose an interactive, scribble-based annotation framework which operates on the whole image to produce segmentations for all regions. This enables sharing scribble corrections across regions, and allows the annotator to focus on the largest errors made by the machine across the whole image. To realize this, we adapt Mask-RCNN into a fast interactive segmentation framework and introduce an instance-aware loss measured at the pixel-level in the full image canvas, w…
Salient object detection segments attractive objects in scenes. RGB and thermal modalities provide complementary information and scribble annotations alleviate large amounts of human labor. Based on the above facts, we propose a scribble-supervised RGB-T salient object detection model. By a four-step solution (expansion, prediction, aggregation, and supervision), label-sparse challenge of scribble-supervised method is solved. To expand scribble annotations, we collect the superpixels that foreground scribbles pass through in RGB and thermal images, respectively. The expanded multi-modal labels…
ScribFormer: Transformer Makes CNN Work Better for Scribble-based Medical Image Segmentation
Xiamen University（厦门大学）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；Peking University（北京大学）；University of Hull（赫尔大学）；Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Hong Kong Institute of Medical Engineering（香港医学工程研究所）；Hong Kong Centre for Cerebro-cardiovascular Health Engineering（香港心脑血管健康工程中心）；ShanghaiTech University（上海科技大学）；Shanghai United Imaging Intelligence Co., Ltd.（上海联影智能医疗科技有限公司）；Shanghai Clinical Research and Trial Center（上海临床研究与试验中心）
Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；ACRV（澳大利亚机器人视觉中心）；Data61（数据61）；University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）；Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）
Compared with laborious pixel-wise dense labeling, it is much easier to label data by scribbles, which only costs 1$\sim$2 seconds to label one image. However, using scribble labels to learn salient object detection has not been explored. In this paper, we propose a weakly-supervised salient object detection model to learn saliency from such annotations. In doing so, we first relabel an existing large-scale salient object detection dataset with scribbles, namely S-DUTS dataset. Since object structure and detail information is not identified by scribbles, directly training with scribble labels …
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；German Aerospace Center（德国航空航天中心）；Wageningen University（瓦赫宁根大学）；Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne（洛桑联邦理工学院）
Training Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for very high resolution images requires a large quantity of high-quality pixel-level annotations, which is extremely labor- and time-consuming to produce. Moreover, professional photo interpreters might have to be involved for guaranteeing the correctness of annotations. To alleviate such a burden, we propose a framework for semantic segmentation of aerial images based on incomplete annotations, where annotators are asked to label a few pixels with easy-to-draw scribbles. To exploit these sparse scribbled annotations, we propose the FEature and Sp…
S$^2$ME: Spatial-Spectral Mutual Teaching and Ensemble Learning for Scribble-supervised Polyp Segmentation
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Hubei University of Technology（湖北工业大学）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）
Existing camouflaged object detection (COD) methods rely heavily on large-scale datasets with pixel-wise annotations. However, due to the ambiguous boundary, annotating camouflage objects pixel-wisely is very time-consuming and labor-intensive, taking ~60mins to label one image. In this paper, we propose the first weakly-supervised COD method, using scribble annotations as supervision. To achieve this, we first relabel 4,040 images in existing camouflaged object datasets with scribbles, which takes ~10s to label one image. As scribble annotations only describe the primary structure of objects …
We address interactive panoptic annotation, where one segment all object and stuff regions in an image. We investigate two graph-based segmentation algorithms that both enforce connectivity of each region, with a notable class-aware Integer Linear Programming (ILP) formulation that ensures global optimum. Both algorithms can take RGB, or utilize the feature maps from any DCNN, whether trained on the target dataset or not, as input. We then propose an interactive, scribble-based annotation framework.
University College London（伦敦大学学院）；KU Leuven（鲁汶大学）；University Hospitals KU Leuven（鲁汶大学医院）
Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance for automatic medical image segmentation. However, they have not demonstrated sufficiently accurate and robust results for clinical use. In addition, they are limited by the lack of image-specific adaptation and the lack of generalizability to previously unseen object classes. To address these problems, we propose a novel deep learning-based framework for interactive segmentation by incorporating CNNs into a bounding box and scribble-based segmentation pipeline. We propose image-specific fine-tuning to make a CNN m…
Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology（蔚山科学技术院）；Korea University（高丽大学）
Segmentation is a fundamental process in microscopic cell image analysis. With the advent of recent advances in deep learning, more accurate and high-throughput cell segmentation has become feasible. However, most existing deep learning-based cell segmentation algorithms require fully annotated ground-truth cell labels, which are time-consuming and labor-intensive to generate. In this paper, we introduce Scribble2Label, a novel weakly-supervised cell segmentation framework that exploits only a handful of scribble annotations without full segmentation labels. The core idea is to combine pseudo-…
MambaEviScrib: Mamba and Evidence-Guided Consistency Enhance CNN Robustness for Scribble-Based Weakly Supervised Ultrasound Image Segmentation
School of Communication and Information Engineering, Shanghai University（上海大学通信与信息工程学院）；The SMART (Smart Medicine and AI-based Radiology Technology) Lab, Shanghai Institute for Advanced Communication and Data Science, Shanghai University（上海大学先进通信与数据科学研究院智能医学与AI放射技术实验室）；School of Health Science and Engineering, University of Shanghai for Science and Technology（上海科技大学健康科学与工程学院）；Department of Pediatric Cardiology, Shanghai Children's Medical Center, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine（上海交通大学医学院儿童心脏科部）；School of Medical Instruments, Shanghai University of Medicine and Health Sciences（医学仪器学院，上海医学院与健康科学大学）
Debate-Enhanced Pseudo Labeling and Frequency-Aware Progressive Debiasing for Weakly-Supervised Camouflaged Object Detection with Scribble Annotations
School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Southeast University（东南大学计算机科学与工程学院）；Jiangsu Provincial Key Laboratory of Computer Networking Technology（江苏省计算机网络技术重点实验室）；Jiangsu Provincial Key Laboratory of Network and Information Security（江苏省网络与信息安全重点实验室）；Key Laboratory of Computer Network and Information Integration of Ministry of Education of China（教育部计算机网络与信息集成重点实验室）；Nanjing Purple Mountain Laboratories（南京紫金山实验室）；Fintech and Big Data Laboratory of Southeast University（东南大学金融科技与大数据实验室）；Department of Aeronautical and Aviation Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学航空与航空工程系）；School of Computer Science and Engineering, Southeast University（东南大学计算机科学与工程学院）；School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Queen’s University Belfast（贝尔法斯特女王大学电子、电气与计算机科学学院）
Weakly-Supervised RGB-D Salient Object Detection via SAM-driven Pseudo Annotation and State Space Interaction-based Diffusion
School of Communication and Information Engineering, Shanghai University（上海大学通信与信息工程学院）；School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学计算机科学与工程学院）
TABNet: A Triplet Augmentation Self-Recovery Framework with Boundary-Aware Pseudo-Labels for Medical Image Segmentation
School of Information Science and Technology, Northwest University（信息科学与技术学院，西北大学）；Institute of Biomedical Engineering, Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford（生物医学工程研究所，工程科学系，牛津大学）
Télécom Paris - Institut Polytechnique de Paris（巴黎理工学院巴黎电信学院）；Università di Napoli Parthenope（那不勒斯帕泰诺佩大学）；La Rochelle Université（拉罗谢尔大学）
Semantic segmentation is a fundamental topic in computer vision. Several deep learning methods have been proposed for semantic segmentation with outstanding results. However, these models require a lot of densely annotated images. To address this problem, we propose a new algorithm that uses HyperGraph Convolutional Networks for Weakly-supervised Semantic Segmentation (HyperGCN-WSS). Our algorithm constructs spatial and k-Nearest Neighbor (k-NN) graphs from the images in the dataset to generate the hypergraphs. Then, we train a specialized HyperGraph Convolutional Network (HyperGCN) architectu…
Cardiac segmentation is an essential step for the diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases. However, pixel-wise dense labeling is both costly and time-consuming. Scribble, as a form of sparse annotation, is more accessible than full annotations. However, it's particularly challenging to train a segmentation network with weak supervision from scribbles. To tackle this problem, we propose a new scribble-guided method for cardiac segmentation, based on the Positive-Unlabeled (PU) learning framework and global consistency regularization, and termed as ShapePU. To leverage unlabeled pixels via PU learn…
ETH Zürich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）
Semantic segmentation of medical images is a crucial step for the quantification of healthy anatomy and diseases alike. The majority of the current state-of-the-art segmentation algorithms are based on deep neural networks and rely on large datasets with full pixel-wise annotations. Producing such annotations can often only be done by medical professionals and requires large amounts of valuable time. Training a medical image segmentation network with weak annotations remains a relatively unexplored topic. In this work we investigate training strategies to learn the parameters of a pixel-wise s…
Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）
This paper aims to solve the video object segmentation (VOS) task in a scribble-supervised manner, in which VOS models are not only trained by the sparse scribble annotations but also initialized with the sparse target scribbles for inference. Thus, the annotation burdens for both training and initialization can be substantially lightened. The difficulties of scribble-supervised VOS lie in two aspects. On the one hand, it requires the powerful ability to learn from the sparse scribble annotations during training. On the other hand, it demands strong reasoning capability during inference given …
We propose a new approach to interactive image segmentation based on some properties of a family of quadratic optimization problems related to dominant sets, a well-known graph-theoretic notion of a cluster which generalizes the concept of a maximal clique to edge-weighted graphs. In particular, we show that by properly controlling a regularization parameter which determines the structure and the scale of the underlying problem, we are in a position to extract groups of dominant-set clusters which are constrained to contain user-selected elements. The resulting algorithm can deal naturally wit…
Disney Research（迪士尼研究院）；University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学）
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 princi…
Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）；MEGVII Technology（旷视科技）；Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence（北京智源人工智能研究院）
Sparsely annotated semantic segmentation (SASS) aims to train a segmentation network with coarse-grained (i.e., point-, scribble-, and block-wise) supervisions, where only a small proportion of pixels are labeled in each image. In this paper, we propose a novel tree energy loss for SASS by providing semantic guidance for unlabeled pixels. The tree energy loss represents images as minimum spanning trees to model both low-level and high-level pair-wise affinities. By sequentially applying these affinities to the network prediction, soft pseudo labels for unlabeled pixels are generated in a coars…
In this work, the case of semantic segmentation on a small image dataset (simulated by 1000 randomly selected images from PASCAL VOC 2012), where only weak supervision signals (scribbles from user interaction) are available is studied. Especially, to tackle the problem of limited data annotations in image segmentation, transferring different pre-trained models and CRF based methods are applied to enhance the segmentation performance. To this end, RotNet, DeeperCluster, and Semi&Weakly Supervised Learning (SWSL) pre-trained models are transferred and finetuned in a DeepLab-v2 baseline, and dens…
