The success of supervised deep learning models in medical image segmentation relies on detailed annotations. However, labor-intensive manual labeling is costly and inefficient, especially in dense object segmentation. To this end, we propose a self-supervised learning based approach with a Prior Self-activation Module (PSM) that generates self-activation maps from the input images to avoid labeling costs and further produce pseudo masks for the downstream task. To be specific, we firstly train a neural network using self-supervised learning and utilize the gradient information in the shallow layers of the network to generate self-activation maps. Afterwards, a semantic-guided generator is then introduced as a pipeline to transform visual representations from PSM to pixel-level semantic pseudo masks for downstream tasks. Furthermore, a two-stage training module, consisting of a nuclei detection network and a nuclei segmentation network, is adopted to achieve the final segmentation. Experimental results show the effectiveness on two public pathological datasets. Compared with other fully-supervised and weakly-supervised methods, our method can achieve competitive performance without any manual annotations.
Queen Mary University of London（伦敦玛丽女王大学）；Communication University of Zhejiang（浙江传媒学院）；University of Leicester（莱斯特大学）；Hangzhou Dianzi University（杭州电子科技大学）
In this paper, we introduce an unsupervised cancer segmentation framework for histology images. The framework involves an effective contrastive learning scheme for extracting distinctive visual representations for segmentation. The encoder is a Deep U-Net (DU-Net) structure that contains an extra fully convolution layer compared to the normal U-Net. A contrastive learning scheme is developed to solve the problem of lacking training sets with high-quality annotations on tumour boundaries. A specific set of data augmentation techniques are employed to improve the discriminability of the learned …
Exploring Unsupervised Cell Recognition with Prior Self-activation Maps
College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University（浙江大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Research Center for Industries of the Future, Westlake University（西湖大学未来产业研究中心）；School of Engineering, Westlake University（西湖大学工学院）；Westlake University（西湖大学）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）
Existing deep learning-based Unsupervised Salient Object Detection (USOD) methods rely on supervised pre-trained deep models. Moreover, they generate pseudo labels based on hand-crafted features, which lack high-level semantic information. In order to overcome these shortcomings, we propose a new two-stage Activation-to-Saliency (A2S) framework that effectively excavates high-quality saliency cues to train a robust saliency detector. It is worth noting that our method does not require any manual annotation, even in the pre-training phase. In the first stage, we transform an unsupervisedly pre-…
An unsupervised data-driven nuclei segmentation method for histology images, called CBM, is proposed in this work. CBM consists of three modules applied in a block-wise manner: 1) data-driven color transform for energy compaction and dimension reduction, 2) data-driven binarization, and 3) incorporation of geometric priors with morphological processing. CBM comes from the first letter of the three modules - "Color transform", "Binarization" and "Morphological processing". Experiments on the MoNuSeg dataset validate the effectiveness of the proposed CBM method. CBM outperforms all other unsuper…
Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST)（蔚山科学技术院）；Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)（韩国科学技术院）；INEEJI
Despite significant improvements on the image generation performance of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), generations with low visual fidelity still have been observed. As widely used metrics for GANs focus more on the overall performance of the model, evaluation on the quality of individual generations or detection of defective generations is challenging. While recent studies try to detect featuremap units that cause artifacts and evaluate individual samples, these approaches require additional resources such as external networks or a number of training data to approximate the real data…
University of Ljubljana（卢布尔雅那大学）；XLAB d.o.o.（XLAB 有限责任公司）
Detection of visual anomalies refers to the problem of finding patterns in different imaging data that do not conform to the expected visual appearance and is a widely studied problem in different domains. Due to the nature of anomaly occurrences and underlying generating processes, it is hard to characterize them and obtain labeled data. Obtaining labeled data is especially difficult in biomedical applications, where only trained domain experts can provide labels, which often come in large diversity and complexity. Recently presented approaches for unsupervised detection of visual anomalies a…
Fudan University（复旦大学）；Shanghai University of Finance and Economics（上海财经大学）；Deakin University（迪肯大学）
Weakly Supervised Object Localization (WSOL) aims to localize objects with image-level supervision. Existing works mainly rely on Class Activation Mapping (CAM) derived from a classification model. However, CAM-based methods usually focus on the most discriminative parts of an object (i.e., incomplete localization problem). In this paper, we empirically prove that this problem is associated with the mixup of the activation values between less discriminative foreground regions and the background. To address it, we propose Class RE-Activation Mapping (CREAM), a novel clustering-based approach to…
Transcending the Annotation Bottleneck: AI-Powered Discovery in Biology and Medicine
Human Technopole, Milan, Italy（米兰人类技术极地）；Faculty of Computer Science, Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg, Magdeburg, Germany（计算机科学系，奥托·冯·格里克大学马格德堡）
PixelCAM: Pixel Class Activation Mapping for Histology Image Classification and ROI Localization
LIVIA, Dept. of Systems Engineering, ETS Montreal, Canada（LIVIA系统工程系，蒙特利尔大学ETS分校，加拿大）；Goodman Cancer Research Centre, Dept. of Oncology, McGill University, Montreal, Canada（Goodman癌症研究中心，麦吉尔大学肿瘤学系，加拿大）
Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；SenseTime Group Limited（商汤集团有限公司）
Deep learning based salient object detection has recently achieved great success with its performance greatly outperforms any other unsupervised methods. However, annotating per-pixel saliency masks is a tedious and inefficient procedure. In this paper, we note that superior salient object detection can be obtained by iteratively mining and correcting the labeling ambiguity on saliency maps from traditional unsupervised methods. We propose to use the combination of a coarse salient object activation map from the classification network and saliency maps generated from unsupervised methods as pi…
Learning the evolution of real-time strategy (RTS) game is a challenging problem in artificial intelligent (AI) system. In this paper, we present a novel Hebbian learning method to extract the global feature of point sets in StarCraft II game units, and its application to predict the movement of the points. Our model includes encoder, LSTM, and decoder, and we train the encoder with the unsupervised learning method. We introduce the concept of neuron activity aware learning combined with k-Winner-Takes-All. The optimal value of neuron activity is mathematically derived, and experiments support…
University of Warwick（华威大学）；The Alan Turing Institute（艾伦·图灵研究所）；University Hospitals Coventry & Warwickshire（考文垂与沃里克郡大学医院）
Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been recently used for a variety of histology image analysis. However, availability of a large dataset is a major prerequisite for training a CNN which limits its use by the computational pathology community. In previous studies, CNNs have demonstrated their potential in terms of feature generalizability and transferability accompanied with better performance. Considering these traits of CNN, we propose a simple yet effective method which leverages the strengths of CNN combined with the advantages of including contextual information, particularly desig…
The University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）；Nanjing University（南京大学）
Reusable model design becomes desirable with the rapid expansion of computer vision and machine learning applications. In this paper, we focus on the reusability of pre-trained deep convolutional models. Specifically, different from treating pre-trained models as feature extractors, we reveal more treasures beneath convolutional layers, i.e., the convolutional activations could act as a detector for the common object in the image co-localization problem. We propose a simple yet effective method, termed Deep Descriptor Transforming (DDT), for evaluating the correlations of descriptors and then …
USL-Net: Uncertainty Self-Learning Network for Unsupervised Skin Lesion Segmentation
School of Computing and Artificial Intelligence, Southwest Jiaotong University（西南交通大学计算机与人工智能学院）；Engineering Research Center of Sustainable Urban Intelligent Transportation, Ministry of Education（教育部可持续城市智能交通工程研究中心）；National Engineering Laboratory of Integrated Transportation Big Data Application Technology, Southwest Jiaotong University（西南交通大学综合交通大数据应用技术国家工程实验室）；Manufacturing Industry Chains Collaboration and Information Support Technology Key Laboratory of Sichuan Province, Southwest Jiaotong University（西南交通大学四川省制造业产业链协同与信息化支撑技术重点实验室）；Data Recovery Key Laboratory of Sichuan Province, Neijiang Normal University（内江师范学院四川省数据恢复重点实验室）
Portland State University（波特兰州立大学）；New Mexico Consortium（新墨西哥联盟）；Santa Fe Institute（圣菲研究所）；Los Alamos National Laboratory（洛斯阿拉莫斯国家实验室）
Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNN) require millions of labeled training examples for image classification and object detection tasks, which restrict these models to domains where such datasets are available. In this paper, we explore the use of unsupervised sparse coding applied to stereo-video data to help alleviate the need for large amounts of labeled data. We show that replacing a typical supervised convolutional layer with an unsupervised sparse-coding layer within a DCNN allows for better performance on a car detection task when only a limited number of labeled training examples i…
University of Dundee（邓迪大学）；Ninewells Hospital and Medical School（奈恩韦尔斯医院与医学院）
Digital pathology tasks have benefited greatly from modern deep learning algorithms. However, their need for large quantities of annotated data has been identified as a key challenge. This need for data can be countered by using unsupervised learning in situations where data are abundant but access to annotations is limited. Feature representations learned from unannotated data using contrastive predictive coding (CPC) have been shown to enable classifiers to obtain state of the art performance from relatively small amounts of annotated computer vision data. We present a modification to the CP…
Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）；UC Los Angeles（加州大学洛杉矶分校）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Xiamen University（厦门大学）
Few-shot learning is an established topic in natural images for years, but few work is attended to histology images, which is of high clinical value since well-labeled datasets and rare abnormal samples are expensive to collect. Here, we facilitate the study of few-shot learning in histology images by setting up three cross-domain tasks that simulate real clinics problems. To enable label-efficient learning and better generalizability, we propose to incorporate contrastive learning (CL) with latent augmentation (LA) to build a few-shot system. CL learns useful representations without manual la…
Bridging Supervision Gaps: A Unified Framework for Remote Sensing Change Detection
State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping and Remote Sensing, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China（测绘遥感信息工程国家重点实验室，武汉大学，中国）；The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan（东京大学，日本）
Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research IGD（弗劳恩霍夫计算机图形研究所）；TU Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学）
It is challenging to derive explainability for unsupervised or statistical-based face image quality assessment (FIQA) methods. In this work, we propose a novel set of explainability tools to derive reasoning for different FIQA decisions and their face recognition (FR) performance implications. We avoid limiting the deployment of our tools to certain FIQA methods by basing our analyses on the behavior of FR models when processing samples with different FIQA decisions. This leads to explainability tools that can be applied for any FIQA method with any CNN-based FR solution using activation mappi…
College of Engineering, Osmania University（奥斯马尼亚大学工程学院）；Altech Imaging & Computing（阿尔泰克成像与计算公司）；Sreenidhi Institute of Science and Technology（斯雷尼迪科技学院）
This paper proposes an unsupervised learning technique by using Multi-layer Mirroring Neural Network and Forgy's clustering algorithm. Multi-layer Mirroring Neural Network is a neural network that can be trained with generalized data inputs (different categories of image patterns) to perform non-linear dimensionality reduction and the resultant low-dimensional code is used for unsupervised pattern classification using Forgy's algorithm. By adapting the non-linear activation function (modified sigmoidal function) and initializing the weights and bias terms to small random values, mirroring of t…
University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）；Heriot-Watt University（赫瑞-瓦特大学）
Autofluorescence lifetime images reveal unique characteristics of endogenous fluorescence in biological samples. Comprehensive understanding and clinical diagnosis rely on co-registration with the gold standard, histology images, which is extremely challenging due to the difference of both images. Here, we show an unsupervised image-to-image translation network that significantly improves the success of the co-registration using a conventional optimisation-based regression network, applicable to autofluorescence lifetime images at different emission wavelengths. A preliminary blind comparison …
Part models of object categories are essential for challenging recognition tasks, where differences in categories are subtle and only reflected in appearances of small parts of the object. We present an approach that is able to learn part models in a completely unsupervised manner, without part annotations and even without given bounding boxes during learning. The key idea is to find constellations of neural activation patterns computed using convolutional neural networks. In our experiments, we outperform existing approaches for fine-grained recognition on the CUB200-2011, NA birds, Oxford PE…
ÉTS Montreal（蒙特利尔高等技术学院）；Goodman Cancer Research Centre（古德曼癌症研究中心）；McGill University（麦吉尔大学）
Using only global image-class labels, weakly-supervised learning methods, such as class activation mapping, allow training CNNs to jointly classify an image, and locate regions of interest associated with the predicted class. However, without any guidance at the pixel level, such methods may yield inaccurate regions. This problem is known to be more challenging with histology images than with natural ones, since objects are less salient, structures have more variations, and foreground and background regions have stronger similarities. Therefore, computer vision methods for visual interpretatio…
Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）；Seoul National University（首尔大学）
We present neural activation coding (NAC) as a novel approach for learning deep representations from unlabeled data for downstream applications. We argue that the deep encoder should maximize its nonlinear expressivity on the data for downstream predictors to take full advantage of its representation power. To this end, NAC maximizes the mutual information between activation patterns of the encoder and the data over a noisy communication channel. We show that learning for a noise-robust activation code increases the number of distinct linear regions of ReLU encoders, hence the maximum nonlinea…
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Qing Yuan Research Institute（清源研究院）
Detecting aligned 3D keypoints is essential under many scenarios such as object tracking, shape retrieval and robotics. However, it is generally hard to prepare a high-quality dataset for all types of objects due to the ambiguity of keypoint itself. Meanwhile, current unsupervised detectors are unable to generate aligned keypoints with good coverage. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised aligned keypoint detector, Skeleton Merger, which utilizes skeletons to reconstruct objects. It is based on an Autoencoder architecture. The encoder proposes keypoints and predicts activation strengths of …
Despite its great success, backpropagation has certain limitations that necessitate the investigation of new learning methods. In this study, we present a biologically plausible local learning rule that improves upon Hebb's well-known proposal and discovers unsupervised features by local competitions among neurons. This simple learning rule enables the creation of a forward learning paradigm called activation learning, in which the output activation (sum of the squared output) of the neural network estimates the likelihood of the input patterns, or "learn more, activate more" in simpler terms.…
School of Artificial Intelligence, Xidian University（西安电子科技大学人工智能学院）；Department of Computer Science, University of North Carolina at Charlotte（北卡罗来纳大学夏洛特分校计算机科学系）
Annotating histopathological images is a time-consuming andlabor-intensive process, which requires broad-certificated pathologistscarefully examining large-scale whole-slide images from cells to tissues.Recent frontiers of transfer learning techniques have been widely investi-gated for image understanding tasks with limited annotations. However,when applied for the analytics of histology images, few of them can effec-tively avoid the performance degradation caused by the domain discrep-ancy between the source training dataset and the target dataset, suchas different tissues, staining appearanc…
Label- and slide-free tissue histology using 3D epi-mode quantitative phase imaging and virtual H&E staining
University of California, Davis（加利福尼亚大学戴维斯分校）；Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Emory University（埃默里大学）；Emory University School of Medicine（埃默里大学医学院）；UC Davis Health（加州大学戴维斯分校医疗系统）
South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute（南澳大利亚健康与医学研究所）；Research & Development Institute of Northwestern Polytechnical University in Shenzhen（西北工业大学深圳研究院）；National Engineering Laboratory for Integrated Aero-Space-Ground-Ocean Big Data Application Technology（空天地海一体化大数据应用技术国家工程实验室）；Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）；The University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）
Accurate and automated gland segmentation on histology tissue images is an essential but challenging task in the computer-aided diagnosis of adenocarcinoma. Despite their prevalence, deep learning models always require a myriad number of densely annotated training images, which are difficult to obtain due to extensive labor and associated expert costs related to histology image annotations. In this paper, we propose the pairwise relation-based semi-supervised (PRS^2) model for gland segmentation on histology images. This model consists of a segmentation network (S-Net) and a pairwise relation …
In this study, the effects of different class labels created as a result of multiple conceptual meanings on localization using Weakly Supervised Learning presented on Car Dataset. In addition, the generated labels are included in the comparison, and the solution turned into Unsupervised Learning. This paper investigates multiple setups for car localization in the images with other approaches rather than Supervised Learning. To predict localization labels, Class Activation Mapping (CAM) is implemented and from the results, the bounding boxes are extracted by using morphological edge detection. …
CNN visualization and interpretation methods, like class-activation maps (CAMs), are typically used to highlight the image regions linked to class predictions. These models allow to simultaneously classify images and extract class-dependent saliency maps, without the need for costly pixel-level annotations. However, they typically yield segmentations with high false-positive rates and, therefore, coarse visualisations, more so when processing challenging images, as encountered in histology. To mitigate this issue, we propose an active learning (AL) framework, which progressively integrates pix…
We propose a deep learning clustering method that exploits dense features from a segmentation network for emphysema subtyping from computed tomography (CT) scans. Using dense features enables high-resolution visualization of image regions corresponding to the cluster assignment via dense clustering activation maps (dCAMs). This approach provides model interpretability. We evaluated clustering results on 500 subjects from the COPDGenestudy, where radiologists manually annotated emphysema sub-types according to their visual CT assessment. We achieved a 43% unsupervised clustering accuracy, outpe…
This paper proposes a method for machine learning from unlabeled data in the form of a time-series. The mapping that is learned is shown to extract slowly evolving information that would be useful for control applications, while efficiently filtering out unwanted, higher-frequency noise. The method consists of training a feedforward artificial neural network with backpropagation using two opposing objectives. The first of these is to minimize the squared changes in activations between time steps of each unit in the network. This "temporal smoothing" has the effect of correlating inputs that oc…
University College London（伦敦大学学院）；Massachusetts General Hospital（麻省总医院）；Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院）；MIT（麻省理工学院）；Technical University of Denmark（丹麦技术大学）
Segmentation of structural and diffusion MRI (sMRI/dMRI) is usually performed independently in neuroimaging pipelines. However, some brain structures (e.g., globus pallidus, thalamus and its nuclei) can be extracted more accurately by fusing the two modalities. Following the framework of Bayesian segmentation with probabilistic atlases and unsupervised appearance modeling, we present here a novel algorithm to jointly segment multi-modal sMRI/dMRI data. We propose a hierarchical likelihood term for the dMRI defined on the unit ball, which combines the Beta and Dimroth-Scheidegger-Watson distrib…
Partitioning an image into superpixels based on the similarity of pixels with respect to features such as colour or spatial location can significantly reduce data complexity and improve subsequent image processing tasks. Initial algorithms for unsupervised superpixel generation solely relied on local cues without prioritizing significant edges over arbitrary ones. On the other hand, more recent methods based on unsupervised deep learning either fail to properly address the trade-off between superpixel edge adherence and compactness or lack control over the generated number of superpixels. By u…
University of Notre Dame（圣母大学）；McGovern Institute for Brain Research（麦戈文脑科学研究所）
Neuroscience theory posits that the brain's visual system coarsely identifies broad object categories via neural activation patterns, with similar objects producing similar neural responses. Artificial neural networks also have internal activation behavior in response to stimuli. We hypothesize that networks exhibiting brain-like activation behavior will demonstrate brain-like characteristics, e.g., stronger generalization capabilities. In this paper we introduce a human-model similarity (HMS) metric, which quantifies the similarity of human fMRI and network activation behavior. To calculate H…
