The Chan-Vese (CV) model is a classic region-based method in image segmentation. However, its piecewise constant assumption does not always hold for practical applications. Many improvements have been proposed but the issue is still far from well solved. In this work, we propose an unsupervised image segmentation approach that integrates the CV model with deep neural networks, which significantly improves the original CV model's segmentation accuracy. Our basic idea is to apply a deep neural network that maps the image into a latent space to alleviate the violation of the piecewise constant assumption in image space. We formulate this idea under the classic Bayesian framework by approximating the likelihood with an evidence lower bound (ELBO) term while keeping the prior term in the CV model. Thus, our model only needs the input image itself and does not require pre-training from external datasets. Moreover, we extend the idea to multi-phase case and dataset based unsupervised image segmentation. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our model and show that the proposed method is noticeably better than other unsupervised segmentation approaches.
Active Mean Fields for Probabilistic Image Segmentation: Connections with Chan-Vese and Rudin-Osher-Fatemi Models
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill（北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校）；SRI International（SRI国际）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；Two Sigma Investments（Two Sigma投资公司）；Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院）；Brigham and Women’s Hospital（布列根和妇女医院）
Global Pooling, More than Meets the Eye: Position Information is Encoded Channel-Wise in CNNs
Ryerson University（瑞尔森大学）；Vector Institute for AI（向量人工智能研究所）；York University（约克大学）；Toronto AI Lab, LG Electronics（LG电子多伦多人工智能实验室）；Samsung AI Centre Toronto（三星多伦多人工智能中心）；University of Guelph（圭尔夫大学）
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）
