Obtaining precise instance segmentation masks is of high importance in many modern applications such as robotic manipulation and autonomous driving. Currently, many state of the art models are based on the Mask R-CNN framework which, while very powerful, outputs masks at low resolutions which could result in imprecise boundaries. On the other hand, classic variational methods for segmentation impose desirable global and local data and geometry constraints on the masks by optimizing an energy functional. While mathematically elegant, their direct dependence on good initialization, non-robust image cues and manual setting of hyperparameters renders them unsuitable for modern applications. We propose LevelSet R-CNN, which combines the best of both worlds by obtaining powerful feature representations that are combined in an end-to-end manner with a variational segmentation framework. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on COCO and Cityscapes datasets.
Variational Level Set (VLS) has been a widely used method in medical segmentation. However, segmentation accuracy in the VLS method dramatically decreases when dealing with intervening factors such as lighting, shadows, colors, etc. Additionally, results are quite sensitive to initial settings and are highly dependent on the number of iterations. In order to address these limitations, the proposed method incorporates VLS into deep learning by defining a novel end-to-end trainable model called as Deep Recurrent Level Set (DRLS). The proposed DRLS consists of three layers, i.e, Convolutional lay…
Variational multichannel multiclass segmentation using unsupervised lifting with CNNs
University of Innsbruck（因斯布鲁克大学）；VASCage GmbH（VASCage有限责任公司）；MRC-Laboratory of Molecular Biology（英国医学研究委员会分子生物学实验室）；Medical University of Innsbruck（因斯布鲁克医科大学）
As Deep Learning continues to yield successful applications in Computer Vision, the ability to quantify all forms of uncertainty is a paramount requirement for its safe and reliable deployment in the real-world. In this work, we leverage the formulation of variational inference in function space, where we associate Gaussian Processes (GPs) to both Bayesian CNN priors and variational family. Since GPs are fully determined by their mean and covariance functions, we are able to obtain predictive uncertainty estimates at the cost of a single forward pass through any chosen CNN architecture and for…
Thesedays, Convolutional Neural Networks are widely used in semantic segmentation. However, since CNN-based segmentation networks produce low-resolution outputs with rich semantic information, it is inevitable that spatial details (e.g., small bjects and fine boundary information) of segmentation results will be lost. To address this problem, motivated by a variational approach to image segmentation (i.e., level set theory), we propose a novel loss function called the level set loss which is designed to refine spatial details of segmentation results. To deal with multiple classes in an image, …
CoRIS Institute（CoRIS研究所）；Oregon State University（俄勒冈州立大学）；Stony Brook University（石溪大学）
Instance Segmentation, which seeks to obtain both class and instance labels for each pixel in the input image, is a challenging task in computer vision. State-of-the-art algorithms often employ two separate stages, the first one generating object proposals and the second one recognizing and refining the boundaries. Further, proposals are usually based on detectors such as faster R-CNN which search for boxes in the entire image exhaustively. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm that directly utilizes a fully convolutional network (FCN) to predict instance labels. Specifically, we propose…
Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；INRIA（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；University of Trento（特伦托大学）；Fondazione Bruno Kessler（布鲁诺·凯斯勒基金会）
Convolutional neural networks have enabled major progresses in addressing pixel-level prediction tasks such as semantic segmentation, depth estimation, surface normal prediction and so on, benefiting from their powerful capabilities in visual representation learning. Typically, state of the art models integrate attention mechanisms for improved deep feature representations. Recently, some works have demonstrated the significance of learning and combining both spatial- and channelwise attentions for deep feature refinement. In this paper, weaim at effectively boosting previous approaches and pr…
SegTransVAE: Hybrid CNN -- Transformer with Regularization for medical image segmentation
VinBrain JSC.（VinBrain联合股份公司）；University of Science, Ho Chi Minh City（胡志明市科学大学）；Vietnam National University, Ho Chi Minh City（胡志明市越南国家大学）；Vin University（文大大学）
In this paper, the traditional model based variational method and learning based algorithms are naturally integrated to address mixed noise removal problem. To be different from single type noise (e.g. Gaussian) removal, it is a challenge problem to accurately discriminate noise types and levels for each pixel. We propose a variational method to iteratively estimate the noise parameters, and then the algorithm can automatically classify the noise according to the different statistical parameters. The proposed variational problem can be separated into regularization, synthesis, parameter estima…
Beijing Normal University（北京师范大学）；Hong Kong Baptist University（香港浸会大学）
We use Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs) for image segmentation problems. DCNNs can well extract the features from natural images. However, the classification functions in the existing network architecture of CNNs are simple and lack capabilities to handle important spatial information in a way that have been done for many well-known traditional variational models. Prior such as spatial regularity, volume prior and object shapes cannot be well handled by existing DCNNs. We propose a novel Soft Threshold Dynamics (STD) framework which can easily integrate many spatial priors of the cla…
Norwegian Computing Center（挪威计算中心）；UiT the Arctic University of Norway（挪威北极大学）
Capturing global contextual representations by exploiting long-range pixel-pixel dependencies has shown to improve semantic segmentation performance. However, how to do this efficiently is an open question as current approaches of utilising attention schemes or very deep models to increase the models field of view, result in complex models with large memory consumption. Inspired by recent work on graph neural networks, we propose the Self-Constructing Graph (SCG) module that learns a long-range dependency graph directly from the image and uses it to propagate contextual information efficiently…
Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown outstanding performance on image denoising with the help of large-scale datasets. Earlier methods naively trained a single CNN with many pairs of clean-noisy images. However, the conditional distribution of the clean image given a noisy one is too complicated and diverse, so that a single CNN cannot well learn such distributions. Therefore, there have also been some methods that exploit additional noise level parameters or train a separate CNN for a specific noise level parameter. These methods separate the original problem into easier sub-proble…
The University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学）；Xtract AI；Computational Geosciences Inc.（计算地球科学公司）
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have recently seen tremendous success in various computer vision tasks. However, their application to problems with high dimensional input and output, such as high-resolution image and video segmentation or 3D medical imaging, has been limited by various factors. Primarily, in the training stage, it is necessary to store network activations for back propagation. In these settings, the memory requirements associated with storing activations can exceed what is feasible with current hardware, especially for problems in 3D. Motivated by the propagation of signal…
Seoul National University（首尔国立大学）；Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.（三星电子株式会社）
This paper presents a new variational inference framework for image restoration and a convolutional neural network (CNN) structure that can solve the restoration problems described by the proposed framework. Earlier CNN-based image restoration methods primarily focused on network architecture design or training strategy with non-blind scenarios where the degradation models are known or assumed. For a step closer to real-world applications, CNNs are also blindly trained with the whole dataset, including diverse degradations. However, the conditional distribution of a high-quality image given a …
Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) i.e. Residual Networks (ResNets) have been used successfully for many computer vision tasks, but are difficult to scale to 3D volumetric medical data. Memory is increasingly often the bottleneck when training 3D Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). Recently, invertible neural networks have been applied to significantly reduce activation memory footprint when training neural networks with backpropagation thanks to the invertible functions that allow retrieving its input from its output without storing intermediate activations in memory to perform the b…
Data and Web Science Group, University of Mannheim（曼海姆大学数据与网络科学组）；Fraunhofer ITWM, Competence Center HPC（弗劳恩霍夫工业数学研究所高性能计算能力中心）；Fraunhofer Center Machine Learning（弗劳恩霍夫机器学习中心）；Mathematical Image Analysis Group, Saarland University（萨尔大学数学图像分析组）
We propose a light-weight variational framework for online tracking of object segmentations in videos based on optical flow and image boundaries. While high-end computer vision methods on this task rely on sequence specific training of dedicated CNN architectures, we show the potential of a variational model, based on generic video information from motion and color. Such cues are usually required for tasks such as robot navigation or grasp estimation. We leverage them directly for video object segmentation and thus provide accurate segmentations at potentially very low extra cost. Our simple m…
Unleashing Vision Foundation Models for Coronary Artery Segmentation: Parallel ViT-CNN Encoding and Variational Fusion
National-Local Joint Engineering Research Center of Biodiagnosis \& Biotherapy, the Second Affiliated Hospital of Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, 710004, China Institute of Medical Artificial Intelligence, the Second Affiliated Hospital of Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi'an, 710004, China Viadrina European University, Frankfurt (Oder), 15230, Germany
Historical Document Image Binarization is a well-known segmentation problem in image processing. Despite ubiquity, traditional thresholding algorithms achieved limited success on severely degraded document images. With the advent of deep learning, several segmentation models were proposed that made significant progress in the field but were limited by the unavailability of large training datasets. To mitigate this problem, we have proposed a novel two-stage framework -- the first of which comprises a generator that generates degraded samples using variational inference and the second being a C…
Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳））；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯AI实验室）
Generating conversational gestures from speech audio is challenging due to the inherent one-to-many mapping between audio and body motions. Conventional CNNs/RNNs assume one-to-one mapping, and thus tend to predict the average of all possible target motions, resulting in plain/boring motions during inference. In order to overcome this problem, we propose a novel conditional variational autoencoder (VAE) that explicitly models one-to-many audio-to-motion mapping by splitting the cross-modal latent code into shared code and motion-specific code. The shared code mainly models the strong correlati…
Euler's elastica constitute an appealing variational image inpainting model. It minimises an energy that involves the total variation as well as the level line curvature. These components are transparent and make it attractive for shape completion tasks. However, its gradient flow is a singular, anisotropic, and nonlinear PDE of fourth order, which is numerically challenging: It is difficult to find efficient algorithms that offer sharp edges and good rotation invariance. As a remedy, we design the first neural algorithm that simulates inpainting with Euler's Elastica. We use the deep energy c…
Samsung Electronics（三星电子）；Seoul National University（首尔国立大学）
Although the latest high-end smartphone has powerful CPU and GPU, running deeper convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for complex tasks such as ImageNet classification on mobile devices is challenging. To deploy deep CNNs on mobile devices, we present a simple and effective scheme to compress the entire CNN, which we call one-shot whole network compression. The proposed scheme consists of three steps: (1) rank selection with variational Bayesian matrix factorization, (2) Tucker decomposition on kernel tensor, and (3) fine-tuning to recover accumulated loss of accuracy, and each step can be eas…
The rapid development of deep learning techniques has created new challenges in identifying the origin of digital images because generative adversarial networks and variational autoencoders can create plausible digital images whose contents are not present in natural scenes. In this paper, we consider the origin that can be broken down into three categories: natural photographic image (NPI), computer generated graphic (CGG), and deep network generated image (DGI). A method is presented for effectively identifying the origin of digital images that is based on a convolutional neural network (CNN…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）
Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have proven highly effective for visual recognition, where learning a universal representation from activations of convolutional layer plays a fundamental problem. In this paper, we present Fisher Vector encoding with Variational Auto-Encoder (FV-VAE), a novel deep architecture that quantizes the local activations of convolutional layer in a deep generative model, by training them in an end-to-end manner. To incorporate FV encoding strategy into deep generative models, we introduce Variational Auto-Encoder model, which steers a variational inference an…
The Rectified Linear Unit is currently a state-of-the-art activation function in deep convolutional neural networks. To combat ReLU's dying neuron problem, we propose the Parametric Variational Linear Unit (PVLU), which adds a sinusoidal function with trainable coefficients to ReLU. Along with introducing nonlinearity and non-zero gradients across the entire real domain, PVLU acts as a mechanism of fine-tuning when implemented in the context of transfer learning. On a simple, non-transfer sequential CNN, PVLU substitution allowed for relative error decreases of 16.3% and 11.3% (without and wit…
D-CNN and VQ-VAE Autoencoders for Compression and Denoising of Industrial X-ray Computed Tomography Images
Department for X-Ray Imaging, Federal Institute for Materials Research（X射线成像部门，材料研究与测试联邦机构）；Institute of Physics and Astronomy, University of Potsdam（物理与天文学研究所，波茨坦大学）
Univ. Rennes（雷恩大学）；INSA Rennes（雷恩国立应用科学学院）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；University Hospital Bonn（波恩大学医院）；Helmholtz Munich（亥姆霍兹慕尼黑中心）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）
The quality of patient care associated with diagnostic radiology is proportionate to a physician workload. Segmentation is a fundamental limiting precursor to both diagnostic and therapeutic procedures. Advances in machine learning (ML) aim to increase diagnostic efficiency by replacing a single application with generalized algorithms. The goal of unsupervised anomaly detection (UAD) is to identify potential anomalous regions unseen during training, where convolutional neural network (CNN) based autoencoders (AEs) and variational autoencoders (VAEs) are considered a de facto approach for recon…
University of Copenhagen（哥本哈根大学）；Cerebriu AS（Cerebriu公司）；Technical University of Denmark（丹麦技术大学）
Pulmonary opacification is the inflammation in the lungs caused by many respiratory ailments, including the novel corona virus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Chest X-rays (CXRs) with such opacifications render regions of lungs imperceptible, making it difficult to perform automated image analysis on them. In this work, we focus on segmenting lungs from such abnormal CXRs as part of a pipeline aimed at automated risk scoring of COVID-19 from CXRs. We treat the high opacity regions as missing data and present a modified CNN-based image segmentation network that utilizes a deep generative model for dat…
King’s College London（伦敦国王学院）；National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery（国家神经内科和神经外科医院）；Thomas Jefferson University（托马斯·杰斐逊大学）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）
Laser interstitial thermal therapy (LITT) is a novel minimally invasive treatment that is used to ablate intracranial structures to treat mesial temporal lobe epilepsy (MTLE). Region of interest (ROI) segmentation before and after LITT would enable automated lesion quantification to objectively assess treatment efficacy. Deep learning techniques, such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are state-of-the-art solutions for ROI segmentation, but require large amounts of annotated data during the training. However, collecting large datasets from emerging treatments such as LITT is impractical.…
Characterization of Residual Morphological Substructure Using Supervised and Unsupervised Deep Learning
Department of Physics & Astronomy, University of Missouri Kansas City（物理与天文学系，密苏里大学堪萨斯城分校）；Space Telescope Science Institute（空间望远镜科学研究所）；Department of Physics, University of California, Santa Cruz（物理系，加州大学圣克鲁兹分校）；Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Missouri（物理与天文学系，密苏里大学）
