In recent years, weakly supervised models have aided in mass detection using mammography images, decreasing the need for pixel-level annotations. However, most existing models in the literature rely on Class Activation Maps (CAM) as the activation method, overlooking the potential benefits of exploring other activation techniques. This work presents a study that explores and compares different activation maps in conjunction with state-of-the-art methods for weakly supervised training in mammography images. Specifically, we investigate CAM, GradCAM, GradCAM++, XGradCAM, and LayerCAM methods within the framework of the GMIC model for mass detection in mammography images. The evaluation is conducted on the VinDr-Mammo dataset, utilizing the metrics Accuracy, True Positive Rate (TPR), False Negative Rate (FNR), and False Positive Per Image (FPPI). Results show that using different strategies of activation maps during training and test stages leads to an improvement of the model. With this strategy, we improve the results of the GMIC method, decreasing the FPPI value and increasing TPR.
Carleton University（卡尔顿大学）；National Research Council Canada（加拿大国家研究委员会）
Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women worldwide. The most common screening technology is mammography. To reduce the cost and workload of radiologists, we propose a computer aided detection approach for classifying and localizing calcifications and masses in mammogram images. To improve on conventional approaches, we apply deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) for automatic feature learning and classifier building. In computer-aided mammography, deep CNN classifiers cannot be trained directly on full mammogram images because of the loss of image details from resizing at input laye…
NYU Center for Data Science（纽约大学数据科学中心）；Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, NYU（纽约大学库朗数学科学研究所）；NYU Grossman School of Medicine（纽约大学格罗斯曼医学院）；Jagiellonian University（雅盖隆大学）
In the last few years, deep learning classifiers have shown promising results in image-based medical diagnosis. However, interpreting the outputs of these models remains a challenge. In cancer diagnosis, interpretability can be achieved by localizing the region of the input image responsible for the output, i.e. the location of a lesion. Alternatively, segmentation or detection models can be trained with pixel-wise annotations indicating the locations of malignant lesions. Unfortunately, acquiring such labels is labor-intensive and requires medical expertise. To overcome this difficulty, weakl…
Recent mainstream weakly-supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) approaches mainly relies on image-level classification learning, which has limited representation capacity. In this paper, we propose a novel semantic learning based framework, named SLAMs (Semantic Learning based Activation Map), for WSSS.
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 …
Korea Advanced Institute of Science Technology (KAIST)（韩国高等科学技术院（KAIST））
Weakly supervised object localization has recently attracted attention since it aims to identify both class labels and locations of objects by using image-level labels. Most previous methods utilize the activation map corresponding to the highest activation source. Exploiting only one activation map of the highest probability class is often biased into limited regions or sometimes even highlights background regions. To resolve these limitations, we propose to use activation maps, named combinational class activation maps (CCAM), which are linear combinations of activation maps from the highest…
School of Computer Science & Software Engineering, Shenzhen University（深圳大学计算机与软件学院）；Guangdong Key Laboratory of Intelligent Information Processing, Shenzhen University（深圳大学广东省智能信息处理重点实验室）
We present a two-stage learning framework for weakly supervised object localization (WSOL). While most previous efforts rely on high-level feature based CAMs (Class Activation Maps), this paper proposes to localize objects using the low-level feature based activation maps. In the first stage, an activation map generator produces activation maps based on the low-level feature maps in the classifier, such that rich contextual object information is included in an online manner. In the second stage, we employ an evaluator to evaluate the activation maps predicted by the activation map generator. B…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center（合肥综合性国家科学中心人工智能研究院）
Weakly supervised object localization (WSOL) aims to localize objects using only image-level labels. Recently a new paradigm has emerged by generating a foreground prediction map (FPM) to achieve localization task. Existing FPM-based methods use cross-entropy (CE) to evaluate the foreground prediction map and to guide the learning of generator. We argue for using activation value to achieve more efficient learning. It is based on the experimental observation that, for a trained network, CE converges to zero when the foreground mask covers only part of the object region. While activation value …
Shenzhen University（深圳大学）；Wenzhou-Kean University（温州肯恩大学）；Shenzhen Institute of Artificial Intelligence of Robotics of Society（深圳市人工智能与机器人研究院）
While class activation map (CAM) generated by image classification network has been widely used for weakly supervised object localization (WSOL) and semantic segmentation (WSSS), such classifiers usually focus on discriminative object regions. In this paper, we propose Contrastive learning for Class-agnostic Activation Map (C$^2$AM) generation only using unlabeled image data, without the involvement of image-level supervision. The core idea comes from the observation that i) semantic information of foreground objects usually differs from their backgrounds; ii) foreground objects with similar a…
Image-level weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) is a fundamental yet challenging computer vision task facilitating scene understanding and automatic driving. Most existing methods resort to classification-based Class Activation Maps (CAMs) to play as the initial pseudo labels, which tend to focus on the discriminative image regions and lack customized characteristics for the segmentation task. To alleviate this issue, we propose a novel activation modulation and recalibration (AMR) scheme, which leverages a spotlight branch and a compensation branch to obtain weighted CAMs that can …
Extracting class activation maps (CAM) is a key step for weakly-supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS). The CAM of convolution neural networks fails to capture long-range feature dependency on the image and result in the coverage on only foreground object parts, i.e., a lot of false negatives. An intuitive solution is ``coupling'' the CAM with the long-range attention matrix of visual transformers (ViT) We find that the direct ``coupling'', e.g., pixel-wise multiplication of attention and activation, achieves a more global coverage (on the foreground), but unfortunately goes with a great incr…
University of Haifa（海法大学）；IBM Research（IBM研究院）；Bar-Ilan University（巴伊兰大学）
This study presents a novel deep learning architecture for multi-class classification and localization of abnormalities in medical imaging illustrated through experiments on mammograms. The proposed network combines two learning branches. One branch is for region classification with a newly added normal-region class. Second branch is region detection branch for ranking regions relative to one another. Our method enables detection of abnormalities at full mammogram resolution for both weakly and semi-supervised settings. A novel objective function allows for the incorporation of local annotatio…
Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；SenseTime（商汤科技）
Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation (WSSS) is challenging, particularly when image-level labels are used to supervise pixel level prediction. To bridge their gap, a Class Activation Map (CAM) is usually generated to provide pixel level pseudo labels. CAMs in Convolutional Neural Networks suffer from partial activation ie, only the most discriminative regions are activated. Transformer based methods, on the other hand, are highly effective at exploring global context with long range dependency modeling, potentially alleviating the "partial activation" issue. In this paper, we propose the fi…
Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence（启元人工智能研究院）；Mohamed Bin Zayed University of AI（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）；Monash University（莫纳什大学）；Linköping University（林雪平大学）；University of California Merced（加州大学默塞德分校）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）；Yonsei University（延世大学）
This work proposes a weakly-supervised temporal action localization framework, called D2-Net, which strives to temporally localize actions using video-level supervision. Our main contribution is the introduction of a novel loss formulation, which jointly enhances the discriminability of latent embeddings and robustness of the output temporal class activations with respect to foreground-background noise caused by weak supervision. The proposed formulation comprises a discriminative and a denoising loss term for enhancing temporal action localization. The discriminative term incorporates a class…
Robust Activation Map Rectification for Weakly Supervised Volumetric Segmentation: Temporal Coherence as a Free Lunch
School of Computer Science, Hangzhou Dianzi University（杭州电子科技大学计算机学院）；Hangzhou Institute of Technology, Xidian University（西安电子科技大学杭州研究院）；University of Yamanashi（山梨大学）；Department of Electronic Engineering, School of Information Science and Engineering, Fudan University（复旦大学信息科学与工程学院电子工程系）；Ruian People’s Hospital（瑞安市人民医院）；School of Software, Shandong University（山东大学软件学院）
Background Activation Suppression for Weakly Supervised Object Localization and Semantic Segmentation
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center（合肥综合性国家科学中心人工智能研究院）
Institute of Medical Technology, Peking University Health Science Center, Peking University（北京大学医学部医学技术研究院）；Department of Biomedical Engineering, Peking University（北京大学生物医学工程系）；Institute of Biomedical Engineering, Shenzhen Bay Laboratory（深圳湾实验室生物医学工程研究所）；Institute of Biomedical Engineering, Peking University Shenzhen Graduate School（北京大学深圳研究生院生物医学工程研究所）；ByteDance AI Lab, ByteDance（字节跳动人工智能实验室）；Key Laboratory of Carcinogenesis and Translational Research (Ministry of Education), Peking University Cancer Hospital & Institute（北京大学肿瘤医院暨研究所，恶性肿瘤发生与转化研究教育部重点实验室）
Weakly supervised object localization (WSOL) relaxes the requirement of dense annotations for object localization by using image-level classification masks to supervise its learning process. However, current WSOL methods suffer from excessive activation of background locations and need post-processing to obtain the localization mask. This paper attributes these issues to the unawareness of background cues, and propose the background-aware classification activation map (B-CAM) to simultaneously learn localization scores of both object and background with only image-level labels. In our B-CAM, t…
Institute of Medical Technology, Peking University（北京大学医学技术研究院）；Peking University（北京大学）；Institute of Biomedical Engineering, Peking University Shenzhen Graduate School（北京大学深圳研究生院生物医学工程研究所）
Classification activation map (CAM), utilizing the classification structure to generate pixel-wise localization maps, is a crucial mechanism for weakly supervised object localization (WSOL). However, CAM directly uses the classifier trained on image-level features to locate objects, making it prefers to discern global discriminative factors rather than regional object cues. Thus only the discriminative locations are activated when feeding pixel-level features into this classifier. To solve this issue, this paper elaborates a plug-and-play mechanism called BagCAMs to better project a well-train…
BroadCAM: Outcome-agnostic Class Activation Mapping for Small-scale Weakly Supervised Applications
South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）；Guangdong Provincial People’s Hospital (Guangdong Academy of Medical Sciences)（广东省人民医院（广东省医学科学院））；Southern Medical University（南方医科大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
Image-level weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) relies on class activation maps (CAMs) for pseudo labels generation. As CAMs only highlight the most discriminative regions of objects, the generated pseudo labels are usually unsatisfactory to serve directly as supervision. To solve this, most existing approaches follow a multi-training pipeline to refine CAMs for better pseudo-labels, which includes: 1) re-training the classification model to generate CAMs; 2) post-processing CAMs to obtain pseudo labels; and 3) training a semantic segmentation model with the obtained pseudo labels. …
University of Haifa（海法大学）；IBM Research（IBM研究院）；Bar Ilan University（巴伊兰大学）
The high cost of generating expert annotations, poses a strong limitation for supervised machine learning methods in medical imaging. Weakly supervised methods may provide a solution to this tangle. In this study, we propose a novel deep learning architecture for multi-class classification of mammograms according to the severity of their containing anomalies, having only a global tag over the image. The suggested scheme further allows localization of the different types of findings in full resolution. The new scheme contains a dual branch network that combines region-level classification with …
Extracting class activation maps (CAM) is arguably the most standard step of generating pseudo masks for weakly-supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS). Yet, we find that the crux of the unsatisfactory pseudo masks is the binary cross-entropy loss (BCE) widely used in CAM. Specifically, due to the sum-over-class pooling nature of BCE, each pixel in CAM may be responsive to multiple classes co-occurring in the same receptive field. As a result, given a class, its hot CAM pixels may wrongly invade the area belonging to other classes, or the non-hot ones may be actually a part of the class. To th…
Weakly supervised video object localization (WSVOL) allows locating object in videos using only global video tags such as object class. State-of-art methods rely on multiple independent stages, where initial spatio-temporal proposals are generated using visual and motion cues, then prominent objects are identified and refined. Localization is done by solving an optimization problem over one or more videos, and video tags are typically used for video clustering. This requires a model per-video or per-class making for costly inference. Moreover, localized regions are not necessary discriminant b…
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…
Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Ant Group（蚂蚁集团）；Delta Research Center（台达研究中心）
Weakly supervised image segmentation trained with image-level labels usually suffers from inaccurate coverage of object areas during the generation of the pseudo groundtruth. This is because the object activation maps are trained with the classification objective and lack the ability to generalize. To improve the generality of the objective activation maps, we propose a region prototypical network RPNet to explore the cross-image object diversity of the training set. Similar object parts across images are identified via region feature comparison. Object confidence is propagated between regions…
Weakly supervised semantic segmentation and localiza- tion have a problem of focusing only on the most important parts of an image since they use only image-level annota- tions. In this paper, we solve this problem fundamentally via two-phase learning. Our networks are trained in two steps. In the first step, a conventional fully convolutional network (FCN) is trained to find the most discriminative parts of an image. In the second step, the activations on the most salient parts are suppressed by inference conditional feedback, and then the second learning is performed to find the area of the …
Seoul National University（首尔国立大学）；LG AI Research（LG人工智能研究院）
Weakly supervised object localization aims to find a target object region in a given image with only weak supervision, such as image-level labels. Most existing methods use a class activation map (CAM) to generate a localization map; however, a CAM identifies only the most discriminative parts of a target object rather than the entire object region. In this work, we find the gap between classification and localization in terms of the misalignment of the directions between an input feature and a class-specific weight. We demonstrate that the misalignment suppresses the activation of CAM in area…
Since acquiring pixel-wise annotations for training convolutional neural networks for semantic image segmentation is time-consuming, weakly supervised approaches that only require class tags have been proposed. In this work, we propose another form of supervision, namely image captions as they can be found on the Internet. These captions have two advantages. They do not require additional curation as it is the case for the clean class tags used by current weakly supervised approaches and they provide textual context for the classes present in an image. To leverage such textual context, we depl…
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；CAS Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology（中国科学院脑科学与智能技术卓越创新中心）
Weakly supervised semantic segmentation has attracted much research interest in recent years considering its advantage of low labeling cost. Most of the advanced algorithms follow the design principle that expands and constrains the seed regions from class activation maps (CAM). As well-known, conventional CAM tends to be incomplete or over-activated due to weak supervision. Fortunately, we find that semantic segmentation has a characteristic of spatial transformation equivariance, which can form a few self-supervisions to help weakly supervised learning. This work mainly explores the advantag…
Pests and diseases are relevant factors for production losses in agriculture and, therefore, promote a huge investment in the prevention and detection of its causative agents. In many countries, Integrated Pest Management is the most widely used process to prevent and mitigate the damages caused by pests and diseases in citrus crops. However, its results are credited by humans who visually inspect the orchards in order to identify the disease symptoms, insects and mite pests. In this context, we design a weakly supervised learning process guided by saliency maps to automatically select regions…
Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg（弗里德里希-亚历山大-埃尔兰根-纽伦堡大学）
Photovoltaic is one of the most important renewable energy sources for dealing with world-wide steadily increasing energy consumption. This raises the demand for fast and scalable automatic quality management during production and operation. However, the detection and segmentation of cracks on electroluminescence (EL) images of mono- or polycrystalline solar modules is a challenging task. In this work, we propose a weakly supervised learning strategy that only uses image-level annotations to obtain a method that is capable of segmenting cracks on EL images of solar cells. We use a modified Res…
National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University（台湾阳明交通大学）
This work addresses weakly-supervised image semantic segmentation based on image-level class labels. One common approach to this task is to propagate the activation scores of Class Activation Maps (CAMs) using a random-walk mechanism in order to arrive at complete pseudo labels for training a semantic segmentation network in a fully-supervised manner. However, the feed-forward nature of the random walk imposes no regularization on the quality of the resulting complete pseudo labels. To overcome this issue, we propose a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN)-based feature propagation framework. We f…
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Youtu Lab, Tencent（腾讯优图实验室）；NLPR, Institute of Automation, CAS（中国科学院自动化研究所模式识别国家重点实验室）；Huawei Cloud AI（华为云AI）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
Weakly supervised object localization (WSOL) is a challenging problem when given image category labels but requires to learn object localization models. Optimizing a convolutional neural network (CNN) for classification tends to activate local discriminative regions while ignoring complete object extent, causing the partial activation issue. In this paper, we argue that partial activation is caused by the intrinsic characteristics of CNN, where the convolution operations produce local receptive fields and experience difficulty to capture long-range feature dependency among pixels. We introduce…
South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）；Key Laboratory of Big Data and Intelligent Robot, Ministry of Education（教育部大数据与智能机器人重点实验室）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Pazhou Lab（琶洲实验室）
Weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS), which aims to mine the object regions by merely using class-level labels, is a challenging task in computer vision. The current state-of-the-art CNN-based methods usually adopt Class-Activation-Maps (CAMs) to highlight the potential areas of the object, however, they may suffer from the part-activated issues. To this end, we try an early attempt to explore the global feature attention mechanism of vision transformer in WSSS task. However, since the transformer lacks the inductive bias as in CNN models, it can not boost the performance directly an…
Weakly supervised object localization is a challenging task which aims to localize objects with coarse annotations such as image categories. Existing deep network approaches are mainly based on class activation map, which focuses on highlighting discriminative local region while ignoring the full object. In addition, the emerging transformer-based techniques constantly put a lot of emphasis on the backdrop that impedes the ability to identify complete objects. To address these issues, we present a re-attention mechanism termed token refinement transformer (TRT) that captures the object-level s…
Tencent（腾讯）；Jilin University（吉林大学）；NLPR Institute of Automation CAS（中国科学院自动化研究所模式识别国家重点实验室）；School of Artificial Intelligence UCAS（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）；CASIA-LLVision Joint Lab（中国科学院自动化研究所-联影智能联合实验室）
Weakly supervised object localization(WSOL) remains an open problem given the deficiency of finding object extent information using a classification network. Although prior works struggled to localize objects through various spatial regularization strategies, we argue that how to extract object structural information from the trained classification network is neglected. In this paper, we propose a two-stage approach, termed structure-preserving activation (SPA), toward fully leveraging the structure information incorporated in convolutional features for WSOL. First, a restricted activation mod…
Self-supervised vision transformers can generate accurate localization maps of the objects in an image. However, since they decompose the scene into multiple maps containing various objects, and they do not rely on any explicit supervisory signal, they cannot distinguish between the object of interest from other objects, as required in weakly-supervised object localization (WSOL). To address this issue, we propose leveraging the multiple maps generated by the different transformer heads to acquire pseudo-labels for training a WSOL model. In particular, a new discriminative proposals sampling m…
Radboud University Medical Center（拉德堡德大学医学中心）；Radboud University（拉德堡德大学）；Screenpoint Medical；Delft University of Technology（代尔夫特理工大学）
Computer-aided detection aims to improve breast cancer screening programs by helping radiologists to evaluate digital mammography (DM) exams. DM exams are generated by devices from different vendors, with diverse characteristics between and even within vendors. Physical properties of these devices and postprocessing of the images can greatly influence the resulting mammogram. This results in the fact that a deep learning model trained on data from one vendor cannot readily be applied to data from another vendor. This paper investigates the use of tailored transfer learning methods based on adv…
LPD: Learnable Prototypes with Diversity Regularization for Weakly Supervised Histopathology Segmentation
University of Houston（德克萨斯大学休斯顿分校）；Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology（胡志明市技术大学）；University of Information Technology（信息科技大学）；Vietnam National University Ho Chi Minh City（越南胡志明市国家大学）；University of Technology Sydney（悉尼技术大学）；The University of Danang - VNUK Institute for Research and Executive Education（丹绒大学 - VNUK研究与执行教育学院）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Montefiore Medical Center, Albert Einstein College of Medicine（蒙特夫iore医疗中心，阿尔伯特·爱因斯坦医学院）
Calibrating Undisciplined Over-Smoothing in Transformer for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation
School of Computer and Information Science, Hefei University of Technology（合肥工业大学计算机与信息科学学院）；Key Laboratory of Intelligent Perception and Image Understanding of the Ministry of Education, School of Artificial Intelligence, Xidian University（教育部智能感知与图像理解重点实验室，西安电子科技大学人工智能学院）；Brain and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, School of Automation, Northwestern Polytechnical University（脑与人工智能实验室，西北工业大学自动化学院）
University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；Optimy AI（Optimy人工智能公司）；LG AI Research（LG人工智能研究院）
Weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) with only image-level supervision is a challenging task. Most existing methods exploit Class Activation Maps (CAM) to generate pixel-level pseudo labels for supervised training. However, due to the local receptive field of Convolution Neural Networks (CNN), CAM applied to CNNs often suffers from partial activation -- highlighting the most discriminative part instead of the entire object area. In order to capture both local features and global representations, the Conformer has been proposed to combine a visual transformer branch with a CNN branch.…
Facebook Connectivity Lab（Facebook连接实验室）；University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Facebook Core Data Science（Facebook核心数据科学）
Learning from weakly-supervised data is one of the main challenges in machine learning and computer vision, especially for tasks such as image semantic segmentation where labeling is extremely expensive and subjective. In this paper, we propose a novel neural network architecture to perform weakly-supervised learning by suppressing irrelevant neuron activations. It localizes objects of interest by learning from image-level categorical labels in an end-to-end manner. We apply this algorithm to a practical challenge of transforming satellite images into a map of settlements and individual buildi…
Separate and Conquer: Decoupling Co-occurrence via Decomposition and Representation for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation
Academy for Engineering and Technology, Fudan University（复旦大学工程技术学院）；Digital Medical Research Center, School of Basic Medical Sciences, Fudan University（复旦大学基础医学院数字医学研究中心）；Shandong Computer Science Center (National Supercomputer Center in Jinan)（山东计算中心（国家济南超级计算中心））
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…
