We present CLUSTSEG, a general, transformer-based framework that tackles different image segmentation tasks (i.e., superpixel, semantic, instance, and panoptic) through a unified neural clustering scheme. Regarding queries as cluster centers, CLUSTSEG is innovative in two aspects:1) cluster centers are initialized in heterogeneous ways so as to pointedly address task-specific demands (e.g., instance- or category-level distinctiveness), yet without modifying the architecture; and 2) pixel-cluster assignment, formalized in a cross-attention fashion, is alternated with cluster center update, yet without learning additional parameters. These innovations closely link CLUSTSEG to EM clustering and make it a transparent and powerful framework that yields superior results across the above segmentation tasks.
Image processing is an important research area in computer vision. Image segmentation plays the vital rule in image processing research. There exist so many methods for image segmentation. Clustering is an unsupervised study. Clustering can also be used for image segmentation. In this paper, an in-depth study is done on different clustering techniques that can be used for image segmentation with their pros and cons. An experiment for color image segmentation based on clustering with K-Means algorithm is performed to observe the accuracy of clustering technique for the segmentation purpose.
Hierarchical clustering is an effective and efficient approach widely used for classical image segmentation methods. However, many existing methods using neural networks generate segmentation masks directly from per-pixel features, complicating the architecture design and degrading the interpretability. In this work, we propose a simpler, more interpretable architecture, called HCFormer. HCFormer accomplishes image segmentation by bottom-up hierarchical clustering and allows us to interpret, visualize, and evaluate the intermediate results as hierarchical clustering results. HCFormer can addre…
We propose Clustering Mask Transformer (CMT-DeepLab), a transformer-based framework for panoptic segmentation designed around clustering. It rethinks the existing transformer architectures used in segmentation and detection; CMT-DeepLab considers the object queries as cluster centers, which fill the role of grouping the pixels when applied to segmentation. The clustering is computed with an alternating procedure, by first assigning pixels to the clusters by their feature affinity, and then updating the cluster centers and pixel features. Together, these operations comprise the Clustering Mask …
National College of Engineering（国立工程学院）；Sathakathullah Appa College（萨塔卡图拉·阿帕学院）；Manonmaniam Sundaranar University（马诺尼亚姆·孙达拉纳大学）
Medical image segmentation demands an efficient and robust segmentation algorithm against noise. The conventional fuzzy c-means algorithm is an efficient clustering algorithm that is used in medical image segmentation. But FCM is highly vulnerable to noise since it uses only intensity values for clustering the images. This paper aims to develop a novel and efficient fuzzy spatial c-means clustering algorithm which is robust to noise. The proposed clustering algorithm uses fuzzy spatial information to calculate membership value. The input image is clustered using proposed ISFCM algorithm. A com…
Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；Princeton University（普林斯顿大学）
We present a method for hierarchical image segmentation that defines a disaffinity graph on the image, over-segments it into watershed basins, defines a new graph on the basins, and then merges basins with a modified, size-dependent version of single linkage clustering. The quasilinear runtime of the method makes it suitable for segmenting large images. We illustrate the method on the challenging problem of segmenting 3D electron microscopic brain images.
In computer vision, image segmentation is always selected as a major research topic by researchers. Due to its vital rule in image processing, there always arises the need of a better image segmentation method. Clustering is an unsupervised study with its application in almost every field of science and engineering. Many researchers used clustering in image segmentation process. But still there requires improvement of such approaches. In this paper, a novel approach for clustering based image segmentation is proposed. Here, we give importance on color space and choose lab for this task. The fa…
Princeton University（普林斯顿大学）；Middle East Technical University（中东技术大学）
A new segmentation fusion method is proposed that ensembles the output of several segmentation algorithms applied on a remotely sensed image. The candidate segmentation sets are processed to achieve a consensus segmentation using a stochastic optimization algorithm based on the Filtered Stochastic BOEM (Best One Element Move) method. For this purpose, Filtered Stochastic BOEM is reformulated as a segmentation fusion problem by designing a new distance learning approach. The proposed algorithm also embeds the computation of the optimum number of clusters into the segmentation fusion problem.
St. Petersburg Institute for Informatics and Automation of RAS（俄罗斯科学院圣彼得堡信息学与自动化研究所）
In the paper a piecewise constant image approximations of sequential number of pixel clusters or segments are treated. A majorizing of optimal approximation sequence by hierarchical sequence of image approximations is studied. Transition from pixel clustering to image segmentation by reducing of segment numbers in clusters is provided. Algorithms are proved by elementary formulas.
Image segmentation in the medical domain is a challenging field owing to poor resolution and limited contrast. The predominantly used conventional segmentation techniques and the thresholding methods suffer from limitations because of heavy dependence on user interactions. Uncertainties prevalent in an image cannot be captured by these techniques. The performance further deteriorates when the images are corrupted by noise, outliers and other artifacts. The objective of this paper is to develop an effective robust fuzzy C- means clustering for segmenting vertebral body from magnetic resonance i…
Panoptic segmentation aims to address semantic and instance segmentation simultaneously in a unified framework. However, an efficient solution of panoptic segmentation in applications like autonomous driving is still an open research problem. In this work, we propose a novel LiDAR-based panoptic system, called SMAC-Seg. We present a learnable sparse multi-directional attention clustering to segment multi-scale foreground instances. SMAC-Seg is a real-time clustering-based approach, which removes the complex proposal network to segment instances. Most existing clustering-based methods use the d…
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…
Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya Barcelona Tech（加泰罗尼亚理工大学巴塞罗那技术学院）
This paper presents a co-clustering technique that, given a collection of images and their hierarchies, clusters nodes from these hierarchies to obtain a coherent multiresolution representation of the image collection. We formalize the co-clustering as a Quadratic Semi-Assignment Problem and solve it with a linear programming relaxation approach that makes effective use of information from hierarchies. Initially, we address the problem of generating an optimal, coherent partition per image and, afterwards, we extend this method to a multiresolution framework. Finally, we particularize this fra…
Current state-of-the-art instance segmentation methods are not suited for real-time applications like autonomous driving, which require fast execution times at high accuracy. Although the currently dominant proposal-based methods have high accuracy, they are slow and generate masks at a fixed and low resolution. Proposal-free methods, by contrast, can generate masks at high resolution and are often faster, but fail to reach the same accuracy as the proposal-based methods. In this work we propose a new clustering loss function for proposal-free instance segmentation. The loss function pulls the…
University of California at Davis（加州大学戴维斯分校）；Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；University of Bergen（卑尔根大学）；Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
We propose an effective framework for multi-phase image segmentation and semi-supervised data clustering by introducing a novel region force term into the Potts model. Assume the probability that a pixel or a data point belongs to each class is known a priori. We show that the corresponding indicator function obeys the Bernoulli distribution and the new region force function can be computed as the negative log-likelihood function under the Bernoulli distribution. We solve the Potts model by the primal-dual hybrid gradient method and the augmented Lagrangian method, which are based on two diffe…
Laboratoire Hubert Curien, Université Jean Monnet（让·莫奈大学于贝尔·居里实验室）
Recent advances in depth imaging sensors provide easy access to the synchronized depth with color, called RGB-D image. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised method for indoor RGB-D image segmentation and analysis. We consider a statistical image generation model based on the color and geometry of the scene. Our method consists of a joint color-spatial-directional clustering method followed by a statistical planar region merging method. We evaluate our method on the NYU depth database and compare it with existing unsupervised RGB-D segmentation methods. Results show that, it is comparable w…
Semantic and instance segmentation algorithms are two general yet distinct image segmentation solutions powered by Convolution Neural Network. While semantic segmentation benefits extensively from the end-to-end training strategy, instance segmentation is frequently framed as a multi-stage task, supported by learning-based discrimination and post-process clustering. Independent optimizations on substages instigate the accumulation of segmentation errors. In this work, we propose to embed prior clustering information into an embedding learning framework FCRNet, stimulating the one-stage instanc…
University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；Cornell University（康奈尔大学）
We present a new framework for semantic segmentation without annotations via clustering. Off-the-shelf clustering methods are limited to curated, single-label, and object-centric images yet real-world data are dominantly uncurated, multi-label, and scene-centric. We extend clustering from images to pixels and assign separate cluster membership to different instances within each image. However, solely relying on pixel-wise feature similarity fails to learn high-level semantic concepts and overfits to low-level visual cues. We propose a method to incorporate geometric consistency as an inductive…
In this paper we propose a new framework for point cloud instance segmentation. Our framework has two steps: an embedding step and a clustering step. In the embedding step, our main contribution is to propose a probabilistic embedding space for point cloud embedding. Specifically, each point is represented as a tri-variate normal distribution. In the clustering step, we propose a novel loss function, which benefits both the semantic segmentation and the clustering. Our experimental results show important improvements to the SOTA, i.e., 3.1% increased average per-category mAP on the PartNet dat…
Image segmentation is a popular area of research in computer vision that has many applications in automated image processing. A recent technique called piecewise flat embeddings (PFE) has been proposed for use in image segmentation; PFE transforms image pixel data into a lower dimensional representation where similar pixels are pulled close together and dissimilar pixels are pushed apart. This technique has shown promising results, but its original formulation is not computationally feasible for large images. We propose two improvements to the algorithm for computing PFE: first, we reformulate…
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)…
MIS-HCC: Hierarchical Channel Clustering for Efficient Medical Image Segmentation
Yale University（耶鲁大学）；University of Florida（佛罗里达大学）；Wichita State University（威奇托州立大学）；Purdue University（普渡大学）；University of California, Berkeley（加利福尼亚大学伯克利分校）；Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；Stevens Institute of Technology（史蒂文斯理工学院）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）
Tokyo Institute of Technology（东京工业大学）；National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology（产业技术综合研究所）
The usage of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for unsupervised image segmentation was investigated in this study. In the proposed approach, label prediction and network parameter learning are alternately iterated to meet the following criteria: (a) pixels of similar features should be assigned the same label, (b) spatially continuous pixels should be assigned the same label, and (c) the number of unique labels should be large. Although these criteria are incompatible, the proposed approach minimizes the combination of similarity loss and spatial continuity loss to find a plausible solution…
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Shenzhen Campus of Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学深圳校区）；Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab（华为诺亚方舟实验室）
To bridge the gap between supervised semantic segmentation and real-world applications that acquires one model to recognize arbitrary new concepts, recent zero-shot segmentation attracts a lot of attention by exploring the relationships between unseen and seen object categories, yet requiring large amounts of densely-annotated data with diverse base classes. In this paper, we propose a new open-world semantic segmentation pipeline that makes the first attempt to learn to segment semantic objects of various open-world categories without any efforts on dense annotations, by purely exploiting the…
Self-supervised instance discrimination is an effective contrastive pretext task to learn feature representations and address limited medical image annotations. The idea is to make features of transformed versions of the same images similar while forcing all other augmented images' representations to contrast. However, this instance-based contrastive learning leaves performance on the table by failing to maximize feature affinity between images with similar content while counter-productively pushing their representations apart. Recent improvements on this paradigm (e.g., leveraging multi-modal…
Many approaches to 3D image segmentation are based on hierarchical clustering of supervoxels into image regions. Here we describe a distributed algorithm capable of handling a tremendous number of supervoxels. The algorithm works recursively, the regions are divided into chunks that are processed independently in parallel by multiple workers. At each round of the recursive procedure, the chunk size in all dimensions are doubled until a single chunk encompasses the entire image. The final result is provably independent of the chunking scheme, and the same as if the entire image were processed w…
College of Mathematics and Statistic, Henan University（河南大学数学与统计学院）
The performance of image segmentation highly relies on the original inputting image. When the image is contaminated by some noises or blurs, we can not obtain the efficient segmentation result by using direct segmentation methods. In order to efficiently segment the contaminated image, this paper proposes a two step method based on the hybrid total variation model with a box constraint and the K-means clustering method. In the first step, the hybrid model is based on the weighted convex combination between the total variation functional and the high-order total variation as the regularization …
City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）；University of Calgary（卡尔加里大学）；University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）
Computer vision enables the development of new approaches to monitor the behavior, health, and welfare of animals. Instance segmentation is a high-precision method in computer vision for detecting individual animals of interest. This method can be used for in-depth analysis of animals, such as examining their subtle interactive behaviors, from videos and images. However, existing deep-learning-based instance segmentation methods have been mostly developed based on public datasets, which largely omit heavy occlusion problems; therefore, these methods have limitations in real-world applications …
In recent years, spectral clustering has become one of the most popular clustering algorithms for image segmentation. However, it has restricted applicability to large-scale images due to its high computational complexity. In this paper, we first propose a novel algorithm called Fast Spectral Clustering based on quad-tree decomposition. The algorithm focuses on the spectral clustering at superpixel level and its computational complexity is O(nlogn) + O(m) + O(m^(3/2)); its memory cost is O(m), where n and m are the numbers of pixels and the superpixels of a image. Then we propose Multiscale Fa…
We propose a deep clustering architecture alongside image segmentation for medical image analysis. The main idea is based on unsupervised learning to cluster images on severity of the disease in the subject's sample, and this image is then segmented to highlight and outline regions of interest. We start with training an autoencoder on the images for segmentation. The encoder part from the autoencoder branches out to a clustering node and segmentation node. Deep clustering using Kmeans clustering is performed at the clustering branch and a lightweight model is used for segmentation. Each of the…
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）
The goal of salient region detection is to identify the regions of an image that attract the most attention. Many methods have achieved state-of-the-art performance levels on this task. Recently, salient instance segmentation has become an even more challenging task than traditional salient region detection; however, few of the existing methods have concentrated on this underexplored problem. Unlike the existing methods, which usually employ object proposals to roughly count and locate object instances, our method applies salient objects subitizing to predict an accurate number of instances fo…
Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院上海微系统与信息技术研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；ShanghaiTech University（上海科技大学）
We propose a novel 3D point cloud segmentation framework named SASO, which jointly performs semantic and instance segmentation tasks. For semantic segmentation task, inspired by the inherent correlation among objects in spatial context, we propose a Multi-scale Semantic Association (MSA) module to explore the constructive effects of the semantic context information. For instance segmentation task, different from previous works that utilize clustering only in inference procedure, we propose a Salient Point Clustering Optimization (SPCO) module to introduce a clustering procedure into the traini…
Although spatial information of images usually enhance the robustness of the Fuzzy C-Means (FCM) algorithm, it greatly increases the computational costs for image segmentation. To achieve a sound trade-off between the segmentation performance and the speed of clustering, we come up with a Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence-based FCM algorithm by incorporating a tight wavelet frame transform and a morphological reconstruction operation. To enhance FCM's robustness, an observed image is first filtered by using the morphological reconstruction. A tight wavelet frame system is employed to decompose …
Huazhong University of Science & Technology（华中科技大学）；Horizon Robotics（地平线机器人）
Instance segmentation on point clouds is a fundamental task in 3D scene perception. In this work, we propose a concise clustering-based framework named HAIS, which makes full use of spatial relation of points and point sets. Considering clustering-based methods may result in over-segmentation or under-segmentation, we introduce the hierarchical aggregation to progressively generate instance proposals, i.e., point aggregation for preliminarily clustering points to sets and set aggregation for generating complete instances from sets. Once the complete 3D instances are obtained, a sub-network of …
Nanjing University（南京大学）；Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）
This paper proposes an affinity fusion graph framework to effectively connect different graphs with highly discriminating power and nonlinearity for natural image segmentation. The proposed framework combines adjacency-graphs and kernel spectral clustering based graphs (KSC-graphs) according to a new definition named affinity nodes of multi-scale superpixels. These affinity nodes are selected based on a better affiliation of superpixels, namely subspace-preserving representation which is generated by sparse subspace clustering based on subspace pursuit. Then a KSC-graph is built via a novel ke…
Image segmentation aims at identifying regions of interest within an image, by grouping pixels according to their properties. This task resembles the statistical one of clustering, yet many standard clustering methods fail to meet the basic requirements of image segmentation: segment shapes are often biased toward predetermined shapes and their number is rarely determined automatically. Nonparametric clustering is, in principle, free from these limitations and turns out to be particularly suitable for the task of image segmentation. This is also witnessed by several operational analogies, as, …
Bitdefender（比特梵德）；University of Bucharest（布加勒斯特大学）；Institute of Mathematics of the Romanian Academy（罗马尼亚科学院数学研究所）；Politehnica University of Bucharest（布加勒斯特理工大学）
We pose video object segmentation as spectral graph clustering in space and time, with one graph node for each pixel and edges forming local space-time neighborhoods. We claim that the strongest cluster in this video graph represents the salient object. We start by introducing a novel and efficient method based on 3D filtering for approximating the spectral solution, as the principal eigenvector of the graph's adjacency matrix, without explicitly building the matrix. This key property allows us to have a fast parallel implementation on GPU, orders of magnitude faster than classical approaches …
We describe a new optimization scheme for finding high-quality correlation clusterings in planar graphs that uses weighted perfect matching as a subroutine. Our method provides lower-bounds on the energy of the optimal correlation clustering that are typically fast to compute and tight in practice. We demonstrate our algorithm on the problem of image segmentation where this approach outperforms existing global optimization techniques in minimizing the objective and is competitive with the state of the art in producing high-quality segmentations.
Leipzig University（莱比锡大学）；IfADo - Leibniz Research Centre for Working Environment and Human Factors（莱布尼茨工作环境与人因研究中心）；INRIA Paris（法国国家信息与自动化研究所巴黎中心）；Sorbonne Université（索邦大学）
We present a novel approach that combines machine learning based interactive image segmentation using supervoxels with a clustering method for the automated identification of similarly colored images in large data sets which enables a guided reuse of classifiers. Our approach solves the problem of significant color variability prevalent and often unavoidable in biological and medical images which typically leads to deteriorated segmentation and quantification accuracy thereby greatly reducing the necessary training effort. This increase in efficiency facilitates the quantification of much larg…
Unsupervised semantic segmentation aims to discover groupings within and across images that capture object and view-invariance of a category without external supervision. Grouping naturally has levels of granularity, creating ambiguity in unsupervised segmentation. Existing methods avoid this ambiguity and treat it as a factor outside modeling, whereas we embrace it and desire hierarchical grouping consistency for unsupervised segmentation. We approach unsupervised segmentation as a pixel-wise feature learning problem. Our idea is that a good representation shall reveal not just a particular l…
Instance segmentation is an important pre-processing task in numerous real-world applications, such as robotics, autonomous vehicles, and human-computer interaction. Compared with the rapid development of deep learning for two-dimensional (2D) image tasks, deep learning-based instance segmentation of 3D point cloud still has a lot of room for development. In particular, distinguishing a large number of occluded objects of the same class is a highly challenging problem, which is seen in a robotic bin-picking. In a usual bin-picking scene, many identical objects are stacked together and the mode…
National Institute of Technology, Mizoram（米佐拉姆国家理工学院）
Segmentation partitions an image into different regions containing pixels with similar attributes. A standard non-contextual variant of Fuzzy C-means clustering algorithm (FCM), considering its simplicity is generally used in image segmentation. Using FCM has its disadvantages like it is dependent on the initial guess of the number of clusters and highly sensitive to noise. Satisfactory visual segments cannot be obtained using FCM. Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) belongs to the class of evolutionary algorithms and has good convergence speed and fewer parameters compared to Genetic Algorithms…
In this paper, a fast and practical GPU-based implementation of Fuzzy C-Means(FCM) clustering algorithm for image segmentation is proposed. First, an extensive analysis is conducted to study the dependency among the image pixels in the algorithm for parallelization. The proposed GPU-based FCM has been tested on digital brain simulated dataset to segment white matter(WM), gray matter(GM) and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) soft tissue regions. The execution time of the sequential FCM is 519 seconds for an image dataset with the size of 1MB. While the proposed GPU-based FCM requires only 2.33 seconds …
