Cell instance segmentation is a new and challenging task aiming at joint detection and segmentation of every cell in an image. Recently, many instance segmentation methods have applied in this task. Despite their great success, there still exists two main weaknesses caused by uncertainty of localizing cell center points. First, densely packed cells can easily be recognized into one cell. Second, elongated cell can easily be recognized into two cells. To overcome these two weaknesses, we propose a novel cell instance segmentation network based on multi-scheme regression guidance. With multi-scheme regression guidance, the network has the ability to look each cell in different views. Specifically, we first propose a gaussian guidance attention mechanism to use gaussian labels for guiding the network's attention. We then propose a point-regression module for assisting the regression of cell center. Finally, we utilize the output of the above two modules to further guide the instance segmentation. With multi-scheme regression guidance, we can take full advantage of the characteristics of different regions, especially the central region of the cell. We conduct extensive experiments on benchmark datasets, DSB2018, CA2.5 and SCIS. The encouraging results show that our network achieves SOTA (state-of-the-art) performance. On the DSB2018 and CA2.5, our network surpasses previous methods by 1.2% (AP50). Particularly on SCIS dataset, our network performs stronger by large margin (3.0% higher AP50). Visualization and analysis further prove that our proposed method is interpretable.
South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）；Guangzhou Laboratory（广州实验室）；Wuhan University（武汉大学）
Few-shot instance segmentation (FSIS) conjoins the few-shot learning paradigm with general instance segmentation, which provides a possible way of tackling instance segmentation in the lack of abundant labeled data for training. This paper presents a Fully Guided Network (FGN) for few-shot instance segmentation. FGN perceives FSIS as a guided model where a so-called support set is encoded and utilized to guide the predictions of a base instance segmentation network (i.e., Mask R-CNN), critical to which is the guidance mechanism. In this view, FGN introduces different guidance mechanisms into t…
XJTLU（西交利物浦大学）；University of Liverpool（利物浦大学）；Dinnar Automation Technology（迪纳自动化技术公司）
Few-shot segmentation has been attracting a lot of attention due to its effectiveness to segment unseen object classes with a few annotated samples. Most existing approaches use masked Global Average Pooling (GAP) to encode an annotated support image to a feature vector to facilitate query image segmentation. However, this pipeline unavoidably loses some discriminative information due to the average operation. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective self-guided learning approach, where the lost critical information is mined. Specifically, through making an initial prediction for the a…
ShanghaiTech University（上海科技大学）；Shanghai Engineering Research Center of Intelligent Vision and Imaging（上海智能视觉与成像工程技术研究中心）
Learning segmentation from noisy labels is an important task for medical image analysis due to the difficulty in acquiring highquality annotations. Most existing methods neglect the pixel correlation and structural prior in segmentation, often producing noisy predictions around object boundaries. To address this, we adopt a superpixel representation and develop a robust iterative learning strategy that combines noise-aware training of segmentation network and noisy label refinement, both guided by the superpixels. This design enables us to exploit the structural constraints in segmentation lab…
National Institute of Informatics（国立信息学研究所）；University of Dayton（代顿大学）；University of Science and Vietnam National University, Ho Chi Minh（胡志明市越南国家大学科学大学）
In this paper, we propose Contextual Guided Segmentation (CGS) framework for video instance segmentation in three passes. In the first pass, i.e., preview segmentation, we propose Instance Re-Identification Flow to estimate main properties of each instance (i.e., human/non-human, rigid/deformable, known/unknown category) by propagating its preview mask to other frames. In the second pass, i.e., contextual segmentation, we introduce multiple contextual segmentation schemes. For human instance, we develop skeleton-guided segmentation in a frame along with object flow to correct and refine the re…
Semantic segmentation methods can not directly identify abnormal objects in images. Anomaly Segmentation algorithm from this realistic setting can distinguish between in-distribution objects and Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) objects and output the anomaly probability for pixels. In this paper, a Prototype Guided Anomaly segmentation Network (PGAN) is proposed to extract semantic prototypes for in-distribution training data from limited annotated images. In the model, prototypes are used to model the hierarchical category semantic information and distinguish OOD pixels. The proposed PGAN model incl…
Semantic segmentation is critical to image content understanding and object localization. Recent development in fully-convolutional neural network (FCN) has enabled accurate pixel-level labeling. One issue in previous works is that the FCN based method does not exploit the object boundary information to delineate segmentation details since the object boundary label is ignored in the network training. To tackle this problem, we introduce a double branch fully convolutional neural network, which separates the learning of the desirable semantic class labeling with mask-level object proposals guid…
Semantic segmentation architectures are mainly built upon an encoder-decoder structure. These models perform subsequent downsampling operations in the encoder. Since operations on high-resolution activation maps are computationally expensive, usually the decoder produces output segmentation maps by upsampling with parameters-free operators like bilinear or nearest-neighbor. We propose a Neural Network named Guided Upsampling Network which consists of a multiresolution architecture that jointly exploits high-resolution and large context information. Then we introduce a new module named Guided U…
Rutgers University（罗格斯大学）；Tencent Hippocrates Research Labs（腾讯希波克拉底研究实验室）；Lieber Institute for Brain Development（利伯大脑发育研究所）
Instance segmentation is of great importance for many biological applications, such as study of neural cell interactions, plant phenotyping, and quantitatively measuring how cells react to drug treatment. In this paper, we propose a novel box-based instance segmentation method. Box-based instance segmentation methods capture objects via bounding boxes and then perform individual segmentation within each bounding box region. However, existing methods can hardly differentiate the target from its neighboring objects within the same bounding box region due to their similar textures and low-contras…
Learning semantic segmentation models under image-level supervision is far more challenging than under fully supervised setting. Without knowing the exact pixel-label correspondence, most weakly-supervised methods rely on external models to infer pseudo pixel-level labels for training semantic segmentation models. In this paper, we aim to develop a single neural network without resorting to any external models. We propose a novel self-guided strategy to fully utilize features learned across multiple levels to progressively generate the dense pseudo labels. First, we use high-level features as …
UCAD: Uncertainty-guided Contour-aware Displacement for semi-supervised medical image segmentation
University of Science and Technology of China（科学技术大学）；Suzhou Institute for Advanced Research（苏州先进研究院）；State Key Laboratory of Precision and Intelligent Chemistry（精密与智能化学国家重点实验室）
Nankai University（南开大学）；University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；University of Bath（巴斯大学）
3D spatial information is known to be beneficial to the semantic segmentation task. Most existing methods take 3D spatial data as an additional input, leading to a two-stream segmentation network that processes RGB and 3D spatial information separately. This solution greatly increases the inference time and severely limits its scope for real-time applications. To solve this problem, we propose Spatial information guided Convolution (S-Conv), which allows efficient RGB feature and 3D spatial information integration. S-Conv is competent to infer the sampling offset of the convolution kernel guid…
Language-guided Medical Image Segmentation with Target-informed Multi-level Contrastive Alignments
School of Computer Science, The University of Sydney（悉尼大学计算机科学学院）；Institute of Translational Medicine, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学转化医学研究院）；Zhongguancun Academy & Zhongguancun Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Beijing, China（北京中关村学院及中关村人工智能研究院）；Department of Molecular Imaging, Royal Prince Alfred Hospital（皇家珀斯阿尔弗雷德医院分子成像部）
Referring image segmentation aims to segment the image region of interest according to the given language expression, which is a typical multi-modal task. Existing methods either adopt the pixel classification-based or the learnable query-based framework for mask generation, both of which are insufficient to deal with various text-image pairs with a fix number of parametric prototypes. In this work, we propose an end-to-end framework built on transformer to perform Linguistic query-Guided mask generation, dubbed LGFormer. It views the linguistic features as query to generate a specialized prot…
Automated methods for Cobb angle estimation are of high demand for scoliosis assessment. Existing methods typically calculate the Cobb angle from landmark estimation, or simply combine the low-level task (e.g., landmark detection and spine segmentation) with the Cobb angle regression task, without fully exploring the benefits from each other. In this study, we propose a novel multi-task framework, named Seg4Reg+, which jointly optimizes the segmentation and regression networks. We thoroughly investigate both local and global consistency and knowledge transfer between each other. Specifically, …
Weakly-supervised image segmentation is an important task in computer vision. A key problem is how to obtain high quality objects location from image-level category. Classification activation mapping is a common method which can be used to generate high-precise object location cues. However these location cues are generally very sparse and small such that they can not provide effective information for image segmentation. In this paper, we propose a saliency guided image segmentation network to resolve this problem. We employ a self-attention saliency method to generate subtle saliency maps, an…
Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）；East China Normal University（华东师范大学）；University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
It's a meaningful and attractive topic to build a general and inclusive segmentation model that can recognize more categories in various scenarios. A straightforward way is to combine the existing fragmented segmentation datasets and train a multi-dataset network. However, there are two major issues with multi-dataset segmentation: (1) the inconsistent taxonomy demands manual reconciliation to construct a unified taxonomy; (2) the inflexible one-hot common taxonomy causes time-consuming model retraining and defective supervision of unlabeled categories. In this paper, we investigate the multi-…
Institute of Automation, CAS（中国科学院自动化研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Horizon Robotics, Inc.（地平线机器人公司）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；Noah’s Ark Lab, Huawei Inc.（华为公司诺亚方舟实验室）
This paper studies panoptic segmentation, a recently proposed task which segments foreground (FG) objects at the instance level as well as background (BG) contents at the semantic level. Existing methods mostly dealt with these two problems separately, but in this paper, we reveal the underlying relationship between them, in particular, FG objects provide complementary cues to assist BG understanding. Our approach, named the Attention-guided Unified Network (AUNet), is a unified framework with two branches for FG and BG segmentation simultaneously. Two sources of attentions are added to the BG…
Chinese Academy of Military Science（中国军事科学院）；National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学）
As a powerful way of realizing semi-supervised segmentation, the cross supervision method learns cross consistency based on independent ensemble models using abundant unlabeled images. However, the wrong pseudo labeling information generated by cross supervision would confuse the training process and negatively affect the effectiveness of the segmentation model. Besides, the training process of ensemble models in such methods also multiplies the cost of computation resources and decreases the training efficiency. To solve these problems, we propose a novel cross supervision method, namely unce…
Tsinghua-Berkeley Shenzhen Institute, Tsinghua University（清华大学深圳国际研究生院）；Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab（华为诺亚方舟实验室）
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have witnessed great successes in semantic segmentation, which requires a large number of labeled data for training. We present a novel learning framework called Uncertainty guided Cross-head Co-training (UCC) for semi-supervised semantic segmentation. Our framework introduces weak and strong augmentations within a shared encoder to achieve co-training, which naturally combines the benefits of consistency and self-training. Every segmentation head interacts with its peers and, the weak augmentation result is used for supervising the strong. The consistency training …
The key to a successful cascade architecture for precise instance segmentation is to fully leverage the relationship between bounding box detection and mask segmentation across multiple stages. Although modern instance segmentation cascades achieve leading performance, they mainly make use of a unidirectional relationship, i.e., mask segmentation can benefit from iteratively refined bounding box detection. In this paper, we investigate an alternative direction, i.e., how to take the advantage of precise mask segmentation for bounding box detection in a cascade architecture. We propose a Deeply…
Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
The demand of applying semantic segmentation model on mobile devices has been increasing rapidly. Current state-of-the-art networks have enormous amount of parameters hence unsuitable for mobile devices, while other small memory footprint models follow the spirit of classification network and ignore the inherent characteristic of semantic segmentation. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel Context Guided Network (CGNet), which is a light-weight and efficient network for semantic segmentation. We first propose the Context Guided (CG) block, which learns the joint feature of both local feat…
Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for biomedical image analysis are often of very large size, resulting in high memory requirement and high latency of operations. Searching for an acceptable compressed representation of the base CNN for a specific imaging application typically involves a series of time-consuming training/validation experiments to achieve a good compromise between network size and accuracy. To address this challenge, we propose CC-Net, a new image complexity-guided CNN compression scheme for biomedical image segmentation. Given a CNN model, CC-Net predicts the final accuracy…
2nd Place Solution for MeViS Track in CVPR 2024 PVUW Workshop: Motion Expression guided Video Segmentation
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CASIA)（中国科学院自动化研究所）；School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (UCAS)（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）；Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI)（北京人工智能研究院）；University of Science and Technology Beijing (USTB)（北京科技大学）
Localization-Infused Vision-Language Semantic Fusion for Text-Guided Medical Image Segmentation
Air Force Engineering University（空军工程大学）；Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；Institute of Translational Medicine, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学转化医学研究院）；Zhongguancun Institute of Artificial Intelligence（中关村人工智能研究院）
Self-guided Few-shot Semantic Segmentation for Remote Sensing Imagery Based on Large Vision Models
Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院空天信息创新研究院）；School of Electronic, Electrical and Communication Engineering, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学电子电气与通信工程学院）
Weakly supervised semantic segmentation with only image-level labels aims to reduce annotation costs for the segmentation task. Existing approaches generally leverage class activation maps (CAMs) to locate the object regions for pseudo label generation. However, CAMs can only discover the most discriminative parts of objects, thus leading to inferior pixel-level pseudo labels. To address this issue, we propose a saliency guided Inter- and Intra-Class Relation Constrained (I$^2$CRC) framework to assist the expansion of the activated object regions in CAMs. Specifically, we propose a saliency gu…
SAM-pose2seg: Pose-Guided Human Instance Segmentation in Crowds
Visual Recognition Group（视觉识别组）；Department of Cybernetics（cybernetics系）；Faculty of Electrical Engineering（电气工程系）；Czech Technical University in Prague（布拉格捷克技术大学）
Smoke segmentation is essential to precisely localize wildfire so that it can be extinguished in an early phase. Although deep neural networks have achieved promising results on image segmentation tasks, they are prone to be overconfident for smoke segmentation due to its non-rigid shape and transparent appearance. This is caused by both knowledge level uncertainty due to limited training data for accurate smoke segmentation and labeling level uncertainty representing the difficulty in labeling ground-truth. To effectively model the two types of uncertainty, we introduce a Bayesian generative …
Recent mainstream weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) approaches are mainly based on Class Activation Map (CAM) generated by a CNN (Convolutional Neural Network) based image classifier. In this paper, we propose a novel transformer-based framework, named Semantic Guided Activation Transformer (SemFormer), for WSSS. We design a transformer-based Class-Aware AutoEncoder (CAAE) to extract the class embeddings for the input image and learn class semantics for all classes of the dataset. The class embeddings and learned class semantics are then used to guide the generation of activation …
Increasing attention is being diverted to data-efficient problem settings like Open Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation (OVSS) which deals with segmenting an arbitrary object that may or may not be seen during training. The closest standard problems related to OVSS are Zero-Shot and Few-Shot Segmentation (ZSS, FSS) and their Cross-dataset variants where zero to few annotations are needed to segment novel classes. The existing FSS and ZSS methods utilize fully supervised pixel-labelled seen classes to segment unseen classes. Pixel-level labels are hard to obtain, and using weak supervision in the …
Weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) using only image-level labels can greatly reduce the annotation cost and therefore has attracted considerable research interest. However, its performance is still inferior to the fully supervised counterparts. To mitigate the performance gap, we propose a saliency guided self-attention network (SGAN) to address the WSSS problem. The introduced self-attention mechanism is able to capture rich and extensive contextual information but may mis-spread attentions to unexpected regions. In order to enable this mechanism to work effectively under weak sup…
College of Computer Science and Technology, Huaqiao University（华侨大学计算机科学与技术学院）
Semantic segmentation is an essential step for electron microscopy (EM) image analysis. Although supervised models have achieved significant progress, the need for labor intensive pixel-wise annotation is a major limitation. To complicate matters further, supervised learning models may not generalize well on a novel dataset due to domain shift. In this study, we introduce an adversarial-prediction guided multi-task network to learn the adaptation of a well-trained model for use on a novel unlabeled target domain. Since no label is available on target domain, we learn an encoding representation…
Recent works have achieved great success in improving the performance of multiple computer vision tasks by capturing features with a high channel number utilizing deep neural networks. However, many channels of extracted features are not discriminative and contain a lot of redundant information. In this paper, we address above issue by introducing the Distance Guided Channel Weighting (DGCW) Module. The DGCW module is constructed in a pixel-wise context extraction manner, which enhances the discriminativeness of features by weighting different channels of each pixel's feature vector when model…
Rutgers University（罗格斯大学）；Tencent Hippocrates Research Labs（腾讯希波克拉底研究实验室）；Lieber Institute for Brain Development（利伯大脑发育研究所）
Instance segmentation of biological images is essential for studying object behaviors and properties. The challenges, such as clustering, occlusion, and adhesion problems of the objects, make instance segmentation a non-trivial task. Current box-free instance segmentation methods typically rely on local pixel-level information. Due to a lack of global object view, these methods are prone to over- or under-segmentation. On the contrary, the box-based instance segmentation methods incorporate object detection into the segmentation, performing better in identifying the individual instances. In th…
Shanghai AI Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）；S-Lab, NTU（南洋理工大学S实验室）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
DEtection TRansformer (DETR) started a trend that uses a group of learnable queries for unified visual perception. This work begins by applying this appealing paradigm to LiDAR-based point cloud segmentation and obtains a simple yet effective baseline. Although the naive adaptation obtains fair results, the instance segmentation performance is noticeably inferior to previous works. By diving into the details, we observe that instances in the sparse point clouds are relatively small to the whole scene and often have similar geometry but lack distinctive appearance for segmentation, which are ra…
This paper describes a fast and accurate semantic image segmentation approach that encodes not only the discriminative features from deep neural networks, but also the high-order context compatibility among adjacent objects as well as low level image features. We formulate the underlying problem as the conditional random field that embeds local feature extraction, clique potential construction, and guided filtering within the same framework, and provide an efficient coarse-to-fine solver. At the coarse level, we combine local feature representation and context interaction using a deep convolut…
Asturias University Central Hospital（阿斯图里亚斯大学中央医院）
This abstract briefly describes a segmentation algorithm developed for the ISIC 2017 Skin Lesion Detection Competition hosted at [ref]. The objective of the competition is to perform a segmentation (in the form of a binary mask image) of skin lesions in dermoscopic images as close as possible to a segmentation performed by trained clinicians, which is taken as ground truth. This project only takes part in the segmentation phase of the challenge. The other phases of the competition (feature extraction and lesion identification) are not considered. The proposed algorithm consists of 4 steps: (1)…
The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；Med-X Research Institute, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学Med-X研究院）
The segmentation of medical images is a fundamental step in automated clinical decision support systems. Existing medical image segmentation methods based on supervised deep learning, however, remain problematic because of their reliance on large amounts of labelled training data. Although medical imaging data repositories continue to expand, there has not been a commensurate increase in the amount of annotated data. Hence, we propose a new spatial guided self-supervised clustering network (SGSCN) for medical image segmentation, where we introduce multiple loss functions designed to aid in gro…
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；SenseTime Research（商汤科技研究院）；Shandong Normal University（山东师范大学）
Both high-level and high-resolution feature representations are of great importance in various visual understanding tasks. To acquire high-resolution feature maps with high-level semantic information, one common strategy is to adopt dilated convolutions in the backbone networks to extract high-resolution feature maps, such as the dilatedFCN-based methods for semantic segmentation. However, due to many convolution operations are conducted on the high-resolution feature maps, such methods have large computational complexity and memory consumption. In this paper, we propose one novel holistically…
Shenzhen Microbt Electronics Technology Co., Ltd（深圳比特微电子科技有限公司）；Tencent Jarvis Lab（腾讯贾维斯实验室）；Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳））；Xiamen University（厦门大学）；National Center for Artificial Intelligence, Saudi Data and Artificial Intelligence Authority（沙特数据和人工智能管理局国家人工智能中心）
Semi-supervised learning is a challenging problem which aims to construct a model by learning from limited labeled examples. Numerous methods for this task focus on utilizing the predictions of unlabeled instances consistency alone to regularize networks. However, treating labeled and unlabeled data separately often leads to the discarding of mass prior knowledge learned from the labeled examples. %, and failure to mine the feature interaction between the labeled and unlabeled image pairs. In this paper, we propose a novel method for semi-supervised semantic segmentation named GuidedMix-Net, b…
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）
Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；CSIRO Data61（澳大利亚联邦科学与工业研究组织 Data61）
Pixel-wise clean annotation is necessary for fully-supervised semantic segmentation, which is laborious and expensive to obtain. In this paper, we propose a weakly supervised 2D semantic segmentation model by incorporating sparse bounding box labels with available 3D information, which is much easier to obtain with advanced sensors. We manually labeled a subset of the 2D-3D Semantics(2D-3D-S) dataset with bounding boxes, and introduce our 2D-3D inference module to generate accurate pixel-wise segment proposal masks. Guided by 3D information, we first generate a point cloud of objects and calcu…
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；CVTE Research（CVTE研究院）；Xi’an Institute of Optics and Precision Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院西安光学精密机械研究所）；Alibaba-Zhejiang University Joint Institute of Frontier Technologies（阿里巴巴-浙江大学前沿技术联合研究院）
Most state-of-the-art scene text detection algorithms are deep learning based methods that depend on bounding box regression and perform at least two kinds of predictions: text/non-text classification and location regression. Regression plays a key role in the acquisition of bounding boxes in these methods, but it is not indispensable because text/non-text prediction can also be considered as a kind of semantic segmentation that contains full location information in itself. However, text instances in scene images often lie very close to each other, making them very difficult to separate via se…
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…
