Pixel-wise clean annotation is necessary for fully-supervised semantic segmentation, which is laborious and expensive to obtain. In this paper, we propose a weakly supervised 2D semantic segmentation model by incorporating sparse bounding box labels with available 3D information, which is much easier to obtain with advanced sensors. We manually labeled a subset of the 2D-3D Semantics(2D-3D-S) dataset with bounding boxes, and introduce our 2D-3D inference module to generate accurate pixel-wise segment proposal masks. Guided by 3D information, we first generate a point cloud of objects and calculate objectness probability score for each point. Then we project the point cloud with objectness probabilities back to 2D images followed by a refinement step to obtain segment proposals, which are treated as pseudo labels to train a semantic segmentation network. Our method works in a recursive manner to gradually refine the above-mentioned segment proposals. Extensive experimental results on the 2D-3D-S dataset show that the proposed method can generate accurate segment proposals when bounding box labels are available on only a small subset of training images. Performance comparison with recent state-of-the-art methods further illustrates the effectiveness of our method.
Domain adaptation is an important task to enable learning when labels are scarce. While most works focus only on the image modality, there are many important multi-modal datasets. In order to leverage multi-modality for domain adaptation, we propose cross-modal learning, where we enforce consistency between the predictions of two modalities via mutual mimicking. We constrain our network to make correct predictions on labeled data and consistent predictions across modalities on unlabeled target-domain data. Experiments in unsupervised and semi-supervised domain adaptation settings prove the effectiveness of this novel domain adaptation strategy. Specifically, we evaluate on the task of 3D semantic segmentation using the image and point cloud modality. We leverage recent autonomous driving datasets to produce a wide variety of domain adaptation scenarios including changes in scene layout, lighting, sensor setup and weather, as well as the synthetic-to-real setup. Our method significantly improves over previous uni-modal adaptation baselines on all adaption scenarios. Code will be made available.
While convolutional neural networks need large labeled sets for training images, expert human supervision of such datasets can be very laborious. Proposed solutions propagate labels from a small set of supervised images to a large set of unsupervised ones to obtain sufficient truly-and-artificially labeled samples to train a deep neural network model. Yet, such solutions need many supervised images for validation. We present a loop in which a deep neural network (VGG-16) is trained from a set with more correctly labeled samples along iterations, created by using t-SNE to project the features of its last max-pooling layer into a 2D embedded space in which labels are propagated using the Optimum-Path Forest semi-supervised classifier. As the labeled set improves along iterations, it improves the features of the neural network. We show that this can significantly improve classification results on test data (using only 1\% to 5\% of supervised samples) of three private challenging datasets and two public ones.
Applying artificial intelligence techniques in medical imaging is one of the most promising areas in medicine. However, most of the recent success in this area highly relies on large amounts of carefully annotated data, whereas annotating medical images is a costly process. In this paper, we propose a novel method, called FocalMix, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first to leverage recent advances in semi-supervised learning (SSL) for 3D medical image detection. We conducted extensive experiments on two widely used datasets for lung nodule detection, LUNA16 and NLST. Results show that our proposed SSL methods can achieve a substantial improvement of up to 17.3% over state-of-the-art supervised learning approaches with 400 unlabeled CT scans.
In this paper, we aim to improve the performance of semantic image segmentation in a semi-supervised setting in which training is effectuated with a reduced set of annotated images and additional non-annotated images. We present a method based on an ensemble of deep segmentation models. Each model is trained on a subset of the annotated data, and uses the non-annotated images to exchange information with the other models, similar to co-training. Even if each model learns on the same non-annotated images, diversity is preserved with the use of adversarial samples. Our results show that this ability to simultaneously train models, which exchange knowledge while preserving diversity, leads to state-of-the-art results on two challenging medical image datasets.
In this work, we study the problem of training deep networks for semantic image segmentation using only a fraction of annotated images, which may significantly reduce human annotation efforts. Particularly, we propose a strategy that exploits the unpaired image style transfer capabilities of CycleGAN in semi-supervised segmentation. Unlike recent works using adversarial learning for semi-supervised segmentation, we enforce cycle consistency to learn a bidirectional mapping between unpaired images and segmentation masks. This adds an unsupervised regularization effect that boosts the segmentation performance when annotated data is limited. Experiments on three different public segmentation benchmarks (PASCAL VOC 2012, Cityscapes and ACDC) demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The proposed model achieves 2-4% of improvement with respect to the baseline and outperforms recent approaches for this task, particularly in low labeled data regime.
The main obstacle to weakly supervised semantic image segmentation is the difficulty of obtaining pixel-level information from coarse image-level annotations. Most methods based on image-level annotations use localization maps obtained from the classifier, but these only focus on the small discriminative parts of objects and do not capture precise boundaries. FickleNet explores diverse combinations of locations on feature maps created by generic deep neural networks. It selects hidden units randomly and then uses them to obtain activation scores for image classification. FickleNet implicitly learns the coherence of each location in the feature maps, resulting in a localization map which identifies both discriminative and other parts of objects. The ensemble effects are obtained from a single network by selecting random hidden unit pairs, which means that a variety of localization maps are generated from a single image. Our approach does not require any additional training steps and only adds a simple layer to a standard convolutional neural network; nevertheless it outperforms recent comparable techniques on the Pascal VOC 2012 benchmark in both weakly and semi-supervised settings.
3D image segmentation plays an important role in biomedical image analysis. Many 2D and 3D deep learning models have achieved state-of-the-art segmentation performance on 3D biomedical image datasets. Yet, 2D and 3D models have their own strengths and weaknesses, and by unifying them together, one may be able to achieve more accurate results. In this paper, we propose a new ensemble learning framework for 3D biomedical image segmentation that combines the merits of 2D and 3D models. First, we develop a fully convolutional network based meta-learner to learn how to improve the results from 2D and 3D models (base-learners). Then, to minimize over-fitting for our sophisticated meta-learner, we devise a new training method that uses the results of the base-learners as multiple versions of "ground truths". Furthermore, since our new meta-learner training scheme does not depend on manual annotation, it can utilize abundant unlabeled 3D image data to further improve the model. Extensive experiments on two public datasets (the HVSMR 2016 Challenge dataset and the mouse piriform cortex dataset) show that our approach is effective under fully-supervised, semi-supervised, and transductive settings, and attains superior performance over state-of-the-art image segmentation methods.
In multi-organ segmentation of abdominal CT scans, most existing fully supervised deep learning algorithms require lots of voxel-wise annotations, which are usually difficult, expensive, and slow to obtain. In comparison, massive unlabeled 3D CT volumes are usually easily accessible. Current mainstream works to address the semi-supervised biomedical image segmentation problem are mostly graph-based. By contrast, deep network based semi-supervised learning methods have not drawn much attention in this field. In this work, we propose Deep Multi-Planar Co-Training (DMPCT), whose contributions can be divided into two folds: 1) The deep model is learned in a co-training style which can mine consensus information from multiple planes like the sagittal, coronal, and axial planes; 2) Multi-planar fusion is applied to generate more reliable pseudo-labels, which alleviates the errors occurring in the pseudo-labels and thus can help to train better segmentation networks. Experiments are done on our newly collected large dataset with 100 unlabeled cases as well as 210 labeled cases where 16 anatomical structures are manually annotated by four radiologists and confirmed by a senior expert. The results suggest that DMPCT significantly outperforms the fully supervised method by more than 4% especially when only a small set of annotations is used.
Weakly supervised instance segmentation with image-level labels, instead of expensive pixel-level masks, remains unexplored. In this paper, we tackle this challenging problem by exploiting class peak responses to enable a classification network for instance mask extraction. With image labels supervision only, CNN classifiers in a fully convolutional manner can produce class response maps, which specify classification confidence at each image location. We observed that local maximums, i.e., peaks, in a class response map typically correspond to strong visual cues residing inside each instance. Motivated by this, we first design a process to stimulate peaks to emerge from a class response map. The emerged peaks are then back-propagated and effectively mapped to highly informative regions of each object instance, such as instance boundaries. We refer to the above maps generated from class peak responses as Peak Response Maps (PRMs). PRMs provide a fine-detailed instance-level representation, which allows instance masks to be extracted even with some off-the-shelf methods. To the best of our knowledge, we for the first time report results for the challenging image-level supervised instance segmentation task. Extensive experiments show that our method also boosts weakly supervised pointwise localization as well as semantic segmentation performance, and reports state-of-the-art results on popular benchmarks, including PASCAL VOC 2012 and MS COCO.
Deep convolutional networks for semantic image segmentation typically require large-scale labeled data, e.g. ImageNet and MS COCO, for network pre-training. To reduce annotation efforts, self-supervised semantic segmentation is recently proposed to pre-train a network without any human-provided labels. The key of this new form of learning is to design a proxy task (e.g. image colorization), from which a discriminative loss can be formulated on unlabeled data. Many proxy tasks, however, lack the critical supervision signals that could induce discriminative representation for the target image segmentation task. Thus self-supervision's performance is still far from that of supervised pre-training. In this study, we overcome this limitation by incorporating a "mix-and-match" (M&M) tuning stage in the self-supervision pipeline. The proposed approach is readily pluggable to many self-supervision methods and does not use more annotated samples than the original process. Yet, it is capable of boosting the performance of target image segmentation task to surpass fully-supervised pre-trained counterpart. The improvement is made possible by better harnessing the limited pixel-wise annotations in the target dataset. Specifically, we first introduce the "mix" stage, which sparsely samples and mixes patches from the target set to reflect rich and diverse local patch statistics of target images. A "match" stage then forms a class-wise connected graph, which can be used to derive a strong triplet-based discriminative loss for fine-tuning the network. Our paradigm follows the standard practice in existing self-supervised studies and no extra data or label is required. With the proposed M&M approach, for the first time, a self-supervision method can achieve comparable or even better performance compared to its ImageNet pre-trained counterpart on both PASCAL VOC2012 dataset and CityScapes dataset.