Text segmentation is a prerequisite in many real-world text-related tasks, e.g., text style transfer, and scene text removal. However, facing the lack of high-quality datasets and dedicated investigations, this critical prerequisite has been left as an assumption in many works, and has been largely overlooked by current research. To bridge this gap, we proposed TextSeg, a large-scale fine-annotated text dataset with six types of annotations: word- and character-wise bounding polygons, masks and transcriptions. We also introduce Text Refinement Network (TexRNet), a novel text segmentation approach that adapts to the unique properties of text, e.g. non-convex boundary, diverse texture, etc., which often impose burdens on traditional segmentation models. In our TexRNet, we propose text specific network designs to address such challenges, including key features pooling and attention-based similarity checking. We also introduce trimap and discriminator losses that show significant improvement on text segmentation. Extensive experiments are carried out on both our TextSeg dataset and other existing datasets. We demonstrate that TexRNet consistently improves text segmentation performance by nearly 2% compared to other state-of-the-art segmentation methods. Our dataset and code will be made available at https://github.com/SHI-Labs/Rethinking-Text-Segmentation.
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Shun Hing Institute of Advanced Engineering（信兴高等工程研究所）
Data diversity and volume are crucial to the success of training deep learning models, while in the medical imaging field, the difficulty and cost of data collection and annotation are especially huge. Specifically in robotic surgery, data scarcity and imbalance have heavily affected the model accuracy and limited the design and deployment of deep learning-based surgical applications such as surgical instrument segmentation. Considering this, we rethink the surgical instrument segmentation task and propose a one-to-many data generation solution that gets rid of the complicated and expensive pr…
Continual Alignment for SAM: Rethinking Foundation Models for Medical Image Segmentation in Continual Learning
Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学）；School of Information and Communications Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University（信息与通信工程学院）；School of Mathematics and Statistics, Xi’an Jiaotong University（数学与统计学学院）
Recent researches on unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) have demonstrated that end-to-end ensemble learning frameworks serve as a compelling option for UDA tasks. Nevertheless, these end-to-end ensemble learning methods often lack flexibility as any modification to the ensemble requires retraining of their frameworks. To address this problem, we propose a flexible ensemble-distillation framework for performing semantic segmentation based UDA, allowing any arbitrary composition of the members in the ensemble while still maintaining its superior performance. To achieve such flexibility, our fr…
Rethinking Barely-Supervised Volumetric Medical Image Segmentation from an Unsupervised Domain Adaptation Perspective
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Northeastern University（东北大学计算机科学与工程学院）；Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute, University of Alberta（阿尔伯塔大学阿尔伯塔机器智能研究所）
Rethinking Intracranial Aneurysm Vessel Segmentation: A Perspective from Computational Fluid Dynamics Applications
Artificial Intelligence Innovation and Incubation Institute, Fudan University（复旦大学人工智能创新与孵化院）；Shanghai Academy of Artificial Intelligence for Science（上海人工智能科学研究院）；Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学土木与环境工程系）；Huashan Hospital, Fudan University（复旦大学华山医院）
Recent advances in deep learning for medical image segmentation demonstrate expert-level accuracy. However, in clinically realistic environments, such methods have marginal performance due to differences in image domains, including different imaging protocols, device vendors and patient populations. Here we consider the problem of domain generalization, when a model is trained once, and its performance generalizes to unseen domains. Intuitively, within a specific medical imaging modality the domain differences are smaller relative to natural images domain variability. We rethink data augmentat…
University of Campinas（坎皮纳斯大学）；Université Gustave Eiffel（古斯塔夫·埃菲尔大学）
Despite the progress of interactive image segmentation methods, high-quality pixel-level annotation is still time-consuming and laborious - a bottleneck for several deep learning applications. We take a step back to propose interactive and simultaneous segment annotation from multiple images guided by feature space projection. This strategy is in stark contrast to existing interactive segmentation methodologies, which perform annotation in the image domain. We show that feature space annotation achieves competitive results with state-of-the-art methods in foreground segmentation datasets: iCoS…
We propose a CNN-based approach for multi-camera markerless motion capture of the human body. Unlike existing methods that first perform pose estimation on individual cameras and generate 3D models as post-processing, our approach makes use of 3D reasoning throughout a multi-stage approach. This novelty allows us to use provisional 3D models of human pose to rethink where the joints should be located in the image and to recover from past mistakes. Our principled refinement of 3D human poses lets us make use of image cues, even from images where we previously misdetected joints, to refine our e…
Semantic segmentation aims to robustly predict coherent class labels for entire regions of an image. It is a scene understanding task that powers real-world applications (e.g., autonomous navigation). One important application, the use of imagery for automated semantic understanding of pedestrian environments, provides remote mapping of accessibility features in street environments. This application (and others like it) require detailed geometric information of geographical objects. Semantic segmentation is a prerequisite for this task since it maps contiguous regions of the same class as sing…
Deep neural networks have become a mainstream approach to interactive segmentation. As we show in our experiments, while for some images a trained network provides accurate segmentation result with just a few clicks, for some unknown objects it cannot achieve satisfactory result even with a large amount of user input. Recently proposed backpropagating refinement (BRS) scheme introduces an optimization problem for interactive segmentation that results in significantly better performance for the hard cases. At the same time, BRS requires running forward and backward pass through a deep network s…
University of Lincoln（林肯大学）；Lingnan Normal University（岭南师范学院）
Besides the complex nature of colonoscopy frames with intrinsic frame formation artefacts such as light reflections and the diversity of polyp types/shapes, the publicly available polyp segmentation training datasets are limited, small and imbalanced. In this case, the automated polyp segmentation using a deep neural network remains an open challenge due to the overfitting of training on small datasets. We proposed a simple yet effective polyp segmentation pipeline that couples the segmentation (FCN) and classification (CNN) tasks. We find the effectiveness of interactive weight transfer betwe…
Recently, the concept of unsupervised learning for superpixel segmentation via CNNs has been studied. Essentially, such methods generate superpixels by convolutional neural network (CNN) employed on a single image, and such CNNs are trained without any labels or further information. Thus, such approach relies on the incorporation of priors, typically by designing an objective function that guides the solution towards a meaningful superpixel segmentation. In this paper we propose three key elements to improve the efficacy of such networks: (i) the similarity of the \emph{soft} superpixelated im…
In this work, we revisit atrous convolution, a powerful tool to explicitly adjust filter's field-of-view as well as control the resolution of feature responses computed by Deep Convolutional Neural Networks, in the application of semantic image segmentation. To handle the problem of segmenting objects at multiple scales, we design modules which employ atrous convolution in cascade or in parallel to capture multi-scale context by adopting multiple atrous rates. Furthermore, we propose to augment our previously proposed Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling module, which probes convolutional features a…
Tianjin University（天津大学）；Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）；Central South University（中南大学）
Automatic image segmentation technology is critical to the visual analysis. The autoencoder architecture has satisfying performance in various image segmentation tasks. However, autoencoders based on convolutional neural networks (CNN) seem to encounter a bottleneck in improving the accuracy of semantic segmentation. Increasing the inter-class distance between foreground and background is an inherent characteristic of the segmentation network. However, segmentation networks pay too much attention to the main visual difference between foreground and background, and ignores the detailed edge inf…
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；Deepwise AI Lab（深度智作AI实验室 (Deepwise AI Lab)）
Modern approaches for semantic segmentation usually employ dilated convolutions in the backbone to extract high-resolution feature maps, which brings heavy computation complexity and memory footprint. To replace the time and memory consuming dilated convolutions, we propose a novel joint upsampling module named Joint Pyramid Upsampling (JPU) by formulating the task of extracting high-resolution feature maps into a joint upsampling problem. With the proposed JPU, our method reduces the computation complexity by more than three times without performance loss. Experiments show that JPU is superio…
Many point-based semantic segmentation methods have been designed for indoor scenarios, but they struggle if they are applied to point clouds that are captured by a LiDAR sensor in an outdoor environment. In order to make these methods more efficient and robust such that they can handle LiDAR data, we introduce the general concept of reformulating 3D point-based operations such that they can operate in the projection space. While we show by means of three point-based methods that the reformulated versions are between 300 and 400 times faster and achieve a higher accuracy, we furthermore demons…
BiSeNet has been proved to be a popular two-stream network for real-time segmentation. However, its principle of adding an extra path to encode spatial information is time-consuming, and the backbones borrowed from pretrained tasks, e.g., image classification, may be inefficient for image segmentation due to the deficiency of task-specific design. To handle these problems, we propose a novel and efficient structure named Short-Term Dense Concatenate network (STDC network) by removing structure redundancy. Specifically, we gradually reduce the dimension of feature maps and use the aggregation o…
Fudan University（复旦大学）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）；University of Surrey（萨里大学）；Tencent Youtu Lab（腾讯优图实验室）；Facebook AI（脸书人工智能）
Most recent semantic segmentation methods adopt a fully-convolutional network (FCN) with an encoder-decoder architecture. The encoder progressively reduces the spatial resolution and learns more abstract/semantic visual concepts with larger receptive fields. Since context modeling is critical for segmentation, the latest efforts have been focused on increasing the receptive field, through either dilated/atrous convolutions or inserting attention modules. However, the encoder-decoder based FCN architecture remains unchanged. In this paper, we aim to provide an alternative perspective by treatin…
In recent years Deep Learning has brought about a breakthrough in Medical Image Segmentation. U-Net is the most prominent deep network in this regard, which has been the most popular architecture in the medical imaging community. Despite outstanding overall performance in segmenting multimodal medical images, from extensive experimentations on challenging datasets, we found out that the classical U-Net architecture seems to be lacking in certain aspects. Therefore, we propose some modifications to improve upon the already state-of-the-art U-Net model. Hence, following the modifications we deve…
We present SegNeXt, a simple convolutional network architecture for semantic segmentation. Recent transformer-based models have dominated the field of semantic segmentation due to the efficiency of self-attention in encoding spatial information. In this paper, we show that convolutional attention is a more efficient and effective way to encode contextual information than the self-attention mechanism in transformers. By re-examining the characteristics owned by successful segmentation models, we discover several key components leading to the performance improvement of segmentation models. This …
ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）
Prevalent semantic segmentation solutions, despite their different network designs (FCN based or attention based) and mask decoding strategies (parametric softmax based or pixel-query based), can be placed in one category, by considering the softmax weights or query vectors as learnable class prototypes. In light of this prototype view, this study uncovers several limitations of such parametric segmentation regime, and proposes a nonparametric alternative based on non-learnable prototypes. Instead of prior methods learning a single weight/query vector for each class in a fully parametric manne…
GeoMotion: Rethinking Motion Segmentation via Latent 4D Geometry
College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University of Technology（浙江工业大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Zhejiang Key Laboratory of Visual Information Intelligent Processing（浙江省视觉信息智能处理重点实验室）；State Key Lab of CAD & CG, Zhejiang University（CAD与CG国家重点实验室）
Rethinking MLLM Itself as a Segmenter with a Single Segmentation Token
Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）；University of Birmingham（伯明翰大学）；Beijing Jiaotong University（北京交通大学）；Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence（北京人工智能研究院）
Every Component Counts: Rethinking the Measure of Success for Medical Semantic Segmentation in Multi-Instance Segmentation Tasks
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology（卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院）；HIDSS4Health - Helmholtz Information and Data Science School for Health（HIDSS4Health——亥姆霍兹健康信息与数据科学学院）；University Hospital Essen（埃森大学医院）；University of Duisburg-Essen（杜伊斯堡-埃森大学）；German Cancer Consortium (DKTK)（德国癌症联盟（DKTK））
Deep convolutional semantic segmentation (DCSS) learning doesn't converge to an optimal local minimum with random parameters initializations; a pre-trained model on the same domain becomes necessary to achieve convergence.In this work, we propose a joint cooperative end-to-end learning method for DCSS. It addresses many drawbacks with existing deep semantic segmentation learning; the proposed approach simultaneously learn both segmentation and classification; taking away the essential need of the pre-trained model for learning convergence. We present an improved inception based architecture wi…
Beyond Background Shift: Rethinking Instance Replay in Continual Semantic Segmentation
College of Intelligence and Computing, Tianjin University（天津大学智能与计算学部）；New Laboratory of Pattern Recognition, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所模式识别国家重点实验室）
Stratify or Die: Rethinking Data Splits in Image Segmentation
Machine Learning and Data Analytics Lab, FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg（FAU埃尔兰根-纽伦堡机器学习与数据分析实验室）；Department of Computer Science, University of Bayreuth（拜鲁特大学计算机科学系）
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
This paper presents a simple yet effective approach to modeling space-time correspondences in the context of video object segmentation. Unlike most existing approaches, we establish correspondences directly between frames without re-encoding the mask features for every object, leading to a highly efficient and robust framework. With the correspondences, every node in the current query frame is inferred by aggregating features from the past in an associative fashion. We cast the aggregation process as a voting problem and find that the existing inner-product affinity leads to poor use of memory…
IP-SAM: Rethinking Prompt-Conditioned Segmentation for Prompt-Absent Deployment
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Technology and Engineering Center for Space Utilization, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院空间应用工程与技术中心）
Rethinking Dense Optical Flow without Test-Time Scaling
Visual and Spatial AI Lab（视觉与空间人工智能实验室）；VCCM Section College of PVFA（VCCM学院光电工程学院）；Department of ECEN（电子工程系）；Department of CSCE（计算机科学与工程系）；Texas A&M University（德克萨斯A&M大学）
