Low-level texture feature/knowledge is also of vital importance for characterizing the local structural pattern and global statistical properties, such as boundary, smoothness, regularity, and color contrast, which may not be well addressed by high-level deep features. In this paper, we aim to re-emphasize the low-level texture information in deep networks for semantic segmentation and related knowledge distillation tasks. To this end, we take full advantage of both structural and statistical texture knowledge and propose a novel Structural and Statistical Texture Knowledge Distillation (SSTKD) framework for semantic segmentation. Specifically, Contourlet Decomposition Module (CDM) is introduced to decompose the low-level features with iterative Laplacian pyramid and directional filter bank to mine the structural texture knowledge, and Texture Intensity Equalization Module (TIEM) is designed to extract and enhance the statistical texture knowledge with the corresponding Quantization Congruence Loss (QDL). Moreover, we propose the Co-occurrence TIEM (C-TIEM) and generic segmentation frameworks, namely STLNet++ and U-SSNet, to enable existing segmentation networks to harvest the structural and statistical texture information more effectively. Extensive experimental results on three segmentation tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods and their state-of-the-art performance on seven popular benchmark datasets, respectively.
Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）；University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）
In this work, we explore data augmentations for knowledge distillation on semantic segmentation. To avoid over-fitting to the noise in the teacher network, a large number of training examples is essential for knowledge distillation. Imagelevel argumentation techniques like flipping, translation or rotation are widely used in previous knowledge distillation framework. Inspired by the recent progress on semantic directions on feature-space, we propose to include augmentations in feature space for efficient distillation. Specifically, given a semantic direction, an infinite number of augmentation…
Since annotating pixel-level labels for semantic segmentation is laborious, leveraging synthetic data is an attractive solution. However, due to the domain gap between synthetic domain and real domain, it is challenging for a model trained with synthetic data to generalize to real data. In this paper, considering the fundamental difference between the two domains as the texture, we propose a method to adapt to the texture of the target domain. First, we diversity the texture of synthetic images using a style transfer algorithm. The various textures of generated images prevent a segmentation mo…
Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；Beijing University of Technology（北京工业大学）
Few-shot segmentation focuses on the generalization of models to segment unseen object with limited annotated samples. However, existing approaches still face two main challenges. First, huge feature distinction between support and query images causes knowledge transferring barrier, which harms the segmentation performance. Second, limited support prototypes cannot adequately represent features of support objects, hard to guide high-quality query segmentation. To deal with the above two issues, we propose self-distillation embedded supervised affinity attention model to improve the performance…
Uncertainty-Aware Retinal Vessel Segmentation via Ensemble Distillation
University of Ibadan（伊巴迪安大学）；African Institute for Mathematical Sciences（非洲数学科学研究所）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）；Hertie Institute for Brain Health（海德研究所）
This paper tackles the problem of semi-supervised video object segmentation on resource-constrained devices, such as mobile phones. We formulate this problem as a distillation task, whereby we demonstrate that small space-time-memory networks with finite memory can achieve competitive results with state of the art, but at a fraction of the computational cost (32 milliseconds per frame on a Samsung Galaxy S22). Specifically, we provide a theoretically grounded framework that unifies knowledge distillation with supervised contrastive representation learning. These models are able to jointly bene…
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）；Horizon Robotics（地平线机器人）；Wuhan University（武汉大学）
Current Knowledge Distillation (KD) methods for semantic segmentation often guide the student to mimic the teacher's structured information generated from individual data samples. However, they ignore the global semantic relations among pixels across various images that are valuable for KD. This paper proposes a novel Cross-Image Relational KD (CIRKD), which focuses on transferring structured pixel-to-pixel and pixel-to-region relations among the whole images. The motivation is that a good teacher network could construct a well-structured feature space in terms of global pixel dependencies. CI…
In this paper, we present offline-to-online knowledge distillation (OOKD) for video instance segmentation (VIS), which transfers a wealth of video knowledge from an offline model to an online model for consistent prediction. Unlike previous methods that having adopting either an online or offline model, our single online model takes advantage of both models by distilling offline knowledge. To transfer knowledge correctly, we propose query filtering and association (QFA), which filters irrelevant queries to exact instances. Our KD with QFA increases the robustness of feature matching by encodin…
University of Oxford（牛津大学）；University of Massachusetts Amherst（马萨诸塞大学阿默斯特分校）；CentraleSupélec（巴黎中央理工-高等电力学院）；INRIA-Saclay（法国国家信息与自动化研究所萨克莱分院）
Visual textures have played a key role in image understanding because they convey important semantics of images, and because texture representations that pool local image descriptors in an orderless manner have had a tremendous impact in diverse applications. In this paper we make several contributions to texture understanding. First, instead of focusing on texture instance and material category recognition, we propose a human-interpretable vocabulary of texture attributes to describe common texture patterns, complemented by a new describable texture dataset for benchmarking. Second, we look a…
Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) is a transfer learning task which aims at training on an unlabeled target domain by leveraging a labeled source domain. Beyond the traditional scope of UDA with a single source domain and a single target domain, real-world perception systems face a variety of scenarios to handle, from varying lighting conditions to many cities around the world. In this context, UDAs with several domains increase the challenges with the addition of distribution shifts within the different target domains. This work focuses on a novel framework for learning UDA, continuous UDA…
Knowledge distillation (KD), which can efficiently transfer knowledge from a cumbersome network (teacher) to a compact network (student), has demonstrated its advantages in some computer vision applications. The representation of knowledge is vital for knowledge transferring and student learning, which is generally defined in hand-crafted manners or uses the intermediate features directly. In this paper, we propose a model-agnostic meta knowledge distillation method under the teacher-student architecture for the single image super-resolution task. It provides a more flexible and accurate way t…
Manifold theory has been the central concept of many learning methods. However, learning modern CNNs with manifold structures has not raised due attention, mainly because of the inconvenience of imposing manifold structures onto the architecture of the CNNs. In this paper we present ManifoldNet, a novel method to encourage learning of manifold-aware representations. Our approach segments the input manifold into a set of fragments. By assigning the corresponding segmentation id as a pseudo label to every sample, we convert the problem of preserving the local manifold structure into a point-wise…
Shanghai AI Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；ShanghaiTech University（上海科技大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）
This article addresses the problem of distilling knowledge from a large teacher model to a slim student network for LiDAR semantic segmentation. Directly employing previous distillation approaches yields inferior results due to the intrinsic challenges of point cloud, i.e., sparsity, randomness and varying density. To tackle the aforementioned problems, we propose the Point-to-Voxel Knowledge Distillation (PVD), which transfers the hidden knowledge from both point level and voxel level. Specifically, we first leverage both the pointwise and voxelwise output distillation to complement the spars…
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；SenseTime Group Limited（商汤集团有限公司）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）
We study the problem of distilling knowledge from a large deep teacher network to a much smaller student network for the task of road marking segmentation. In this work, we explore a novel knowledge distillation (KD) approach that can transfer 'knowledge' on scene structure more effectively from a teacher to a student model. Our method is known as Inter-Region Affinity KD (IntRA-KD). It decomposes a given road scene image into different regions and represents each region as a node in a graph. An inter-region affinity graph is then formed by establishing pairwise relationships between nodes bas…
Multi-Dataset Cross-Domain Knowledge Distillation for Unified Medical Image Segmentation, Classification, and Detection
Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Bucharest（布加勒斯特大学数学与计算机科学学院）；Gheorghe Mihoc-Caius Iacob Institute of Mathematical Statistics and Applied Mathematics of the Romanian Academy（罗马尼亚科学院格奥尔基·米霍茨-凯奥斯·伊阿科夫学院数学统计与应用数学研究所）
Displacement Preserving Relational Distillation for Robust Medical Segmentation
Bowling Green State University（鲍灵格林州立大学）；The University of Findlay（芬德利大学）；University of Alabama at Birmingham（阿拉巴马大学伯明翰分校）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；University of Houston - Clear Lake（休斯顿大学清水湖分校）；UTHealth Houston（德克萨斯大学健康科学中心休斯顿分校）
ReCo-KD: Region- and Context-Aware Knowledge Distillation for Efficient 3D Medical Image Segmentation
McWilliams School of Biomedical Informatics, The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth Houston)（麦威廉生物医学信息学学院，德克萨斯大学健康科学中心休斯顿分校（UTHealth休斯顿））
School of Computer Science, Wuhan University（武汉大学计算机学院）；School of Computer Science, The University of Sydney（悉尼大学计算机学院）；School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学计算机科学与工程学院）
Generalizable Knowledge Distillation from Vision Foundation Models for Semantic Segmentation
School of Artificial Intelligence, Xidian University, China（西安电子科技大学人工智能学院）；Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science, University of Trento, Italy（特伦托大学信息工程与计算机科学系）；Department of Automation, Tsinghua University, China（清华大学自动化系）；School of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Hefei University of Technology, China（合肥工业大学计算机科学与信息工程学院）
The performance of nighttime semantic segmentation is restricted by the poor illumination and a lack of pixel-wise annotation, which severely limit its application in autonomous driving. Existing works, e.g., using the twilight as the intermediate target domain to perform the adaptation from daytime to nighttime, may fail to cope with the inherent difference between datasets caused by the camera equipment and the urban style. Faced with these two types of domain shifts, i.e., the illumination and the inherent difference of the datasets, we propose a novel domain adaptation framework via cross-…
Armed Forces Yangju Hospital（杨州武装部队医院）；Seoul National University（首尔国立大学）
For more clinical applications of deep learning models for medical image segmentation, high demands on labeled data and computational resources must be addressed. This study proposes a coarse-to-fine framework with two teacher models and a student model that combines knowledge distillation and cross teaching, a consistency regularization based on pseudo-labels, for efficient semi-supervised learning. The proposed method is demonstrated on the abdominal multi-organ segmentation task in CT images under the MICCAI FLARE 2022 challenge, with mean Dice scores of 0.8429 and 0.8520 in the validation …
Distilling knowledge from huge pre-trained networks to improve the performance of tiny networks has favored deep learning models to be used in many real-time and mobile applications. Several approaches that demonstrate success in this field have made use of the true training dataset to extract relevant knowledge. In absence of the True dataset, however, extracting knowledge from deep networks is still a challenge. Recent works on data-free knowledge distillation demonstrate such techniques on classification tasks. To this end, we explore the task of data-free knowledge distillation for segment…
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center（纪念斯隆·凯特琳癌症中心）
Despite the widespread availability of in-treatment room cone beam computed tomography (CBCT) imaging, due to the lack of reliable segmentation methods, CBCT is only used for gross set up corrections in lung radiotherapies. Accurate and reliable auto-segmentation tools could potentiate volumetric response assessment and geometry-guided adaptive radiation therapies. Therefore, we developed a new deep learning CBCT lung tumor segmentation method. Methods: The key idea of our approach called cross modality educed distillation (CMEDL) is to use magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to guide a CBCT segm…
Imperial College London（伦敦帝国理工学院）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
Multi-modal learning is typically performed with network architectures containing modality-specific layers and shared layers, utilizing co-registered images of different modalities. We propose a novel learning scheme for unpaired cross-modality image segmentation, with a highly compact architecture achieving superior segmentation accuracy. In our method, we heavily reuse network parameters, by sharing all convolutional kernels across CT and MRI, and only employ modality-specific internal normalization layers which compute respective statistics. To effectively train such a highly compact model,…
Shape-intensity knowledge distillation for robust medical image segmentation
National Engineering Research Center for Multimedia Software（国家多媒体软件工程技术研究中心）；School of Computer Science, Wuhan University（武汉大学计算机学院）；Hubei Key Laboratory of Multimedia and Network Communication Engineering, Wuhan University（武汉大学多媒体与网络通信工程湖北省重点实验室）；Medical Artificial Intelligence Research Institute of Renmin Hospital, Wuhan University（武汉大学人民医院医学人工智能研究院）
Henan University of Chinese Medicine（河南中医药大学）；Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）
In recent years, deep convolution neural networks (DCNNs) have achieved great prospects in coronary artery vessel segmentation. However, it is difficult to deploy complicated models in clinical scenarios since high-performance approaches have excessive parameters and high computation costs. To tackle this problem, we propose \textbf{LightVessel}, a Similarity Knowledge Distillation Framework, for lightweight coronary artery vessel segmentation. Primarily, we propose a Feature-wise Similarity Distillation (FSD) module for semantic-shift modeling. Specifically, we calculate the feature similarit…
CCSD: Cross-Modal Compositional Self-Distillation for Robust Brain Tumor Segmentation with Missing Modalities
Shanghai Research Institute for Intelligent Autonomous Systems, Tongji University（上海智能自主系统研究院，同济大学）；College of Biomedical Engineering, Fudan University（生物医学工程学院，复旦大学）；School of Medicine, Tongji University（医学院，同济大学）；College of Information Engineering, China Jiliang University（信息工程学院，中国嘉兴大学）
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；SmartMore（思谋科技）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳））
Few-shot semantic segmentation (FSS) aims to form class-agnostic models segmenting unseen classes with only a handful of annotations. Previous methods limited to the semantic feature and prototype representation suffer from coarse segmentation granularity and train-set overfitting. In this work, we design Hierarchically Decoupled Matching Network (HDMNet) mining pixel-level support correlation based on the transformer architecture. The self-attention modules are used to assist in establishing hierarchical dense features, as a means to accomplish the cascade matching between query and support f…
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；Center for Research on Intelligent Perception and Computing, NLPR, CASIA（中国科学院自动化研究所模式识别国家重点实验室）；Shandong University of Science and Technology（山东科技大学）；Artificial Intelligence Research, CAS (CAS-AIR)（中国科学院人工智能研究院）
In recent years, deep convolutional neural networks have made significant advances in pathology image segmentation. However, pathology image segmentation encounters with a dilemma in which the higher-performance networks generally require more computational resources and storage. This phenomenon limits the employment of high-accuracy networks in real scenes due to the inherent high-resolution of pathological images. To tackle this problem, we propose CoCo DistillNet, a novel Cross-layer Correlation (CoCo) knowledge distillation network for pathological gastric cancer segmentation. Knowledge di…
RPTU Kaiserslautern-Landau（莱茵兰-普法尔茨州凯泽斯劳滕-兰道应用技术大学）；Karlsruhe Institute of Technology（卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院）；Heidelberg University（海德堡大学）；German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI)（德国人工智能研究中心（DFKI））
Morphological atlases are an important tool in organismal studies, and modern high-throughput Computed Tomography (CT) facilities can produce hundreds of full-body high-resolution volumetric images of organisms. However, creating an atlas from these volumes requires accurate organ segmentation. In the last decade, machine learning approaches have achieved incredible results in image segmentation tasks, but they require large amounts of annotated data for training. In this paper, we propose a self-training framework for multi-organ segmentation in tomographic images of Medaka fish. We utilize t…
Kim Jaechul Graduate School of AI, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)（韩国科学技术院金在哲人工智能研究生院）
As segmentation labels are scarce, extensive researches have been conducted to train segmentation networks with domain adaptation, semi-supervised or self-supervised learning techniques to utilize abundant unlabeled dataset. However, these approaches appear different from each other, so it is not clear how these approaches can be combined for better performance. Inspired by recent multi-domain image translation approaches, here we propose a novel segmentation framework using adaptive instance normalization (AdaIN), so that a single generator is trained to perform both domain adaptation and sem…
There has been a recent surge in methods that aim to decompose and segment scenes into multiple objects in an unsupervised manner, i.e., unsupervised multi-object segmentation. Performing such a task is a long-standing goal of computer vision, offering to unlock object-level reasoning without requiring dense annotations to train segmentation models. Despite significant progress, current models are developed and trained on visually simple scenes depicting mono-colored objects on plain backgrounds. The natural world, however, is visually complex with confounding aspects such as diverse textures …
