Lesion segmentation requires both speed and accuracy. In this paper, we propose a simple yet efficient network DSNet, which consists of a encoder based on Transformer and a convolutional neural network(CNN)-based distinct pyramid decoder containing three dual-stream attention (DSA) modules. Specifically, the DSA module fuses features from two adjacent levels through the false positive stream attention (FPSA) branch and the false negative stream attention (FNSA) branch to obtain features with diversified contextual information. We compare our method with various state-of-the-art (SOTA) lesion segmentation methods with several public datasets, including CVC-ClinicDB, Kvasir-SEG, and ISIC-2018 Task 1. The experimental results show that our method achieves SOTA performance in terms of mean Dice coefficient (mDice) and mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) with low model complexity and memory consumption.
Indoor scene classification has become an important task in perception modules and has been widely used in various applications. However, problems such as intra-category variability and inter-category similarity have been holding back the models' performance, which leads to the need for new types of features to obtain a more meaningful scene representation. A semantic segmentation mask provides pixel-level information about the objects available in the scene, which makes it a promising source of information to obtain a more meaningful local representation of the scene. Therefore, in this work, a novel approach that uses a semantic segmentation mask to obtain a 2D spatial layout of the object categories across the scene, designated by segmentation-based semantic features (SSFs), is proposed. These features represent, per object category, the pixel count, as well as the 2D average position and respective standard deviation values. Moreover, a two-branch network, GS2F2App, that exploits CNN-based global features extracted from RGB images and the segmentation-based features extracted from the proposed SSFs, is also proposed. GS2F2App was evaluated in two indoor scene benchmark datasets: the SUN RGB-D and the NYU Depth V2, achieving state-of-the-art results on both datasets.
Recent advances in interactive segmentation (IS) allow speeding up and simplifying image editing and labeling greatly. The majority of modern IS approaches accept user input in the form of clicks. However, using clicks may require too many user interactions, especially when selecting small objects, minor parts of an object, or a group of objects of the same type. In this paper, we consider such a natural form of user interaction as a loose contour, and introduce a contour-based IS method. We evaluate the proposed method on the standard segmentation benchmarks, our novel UserContours dataset, and its subset UserContours-G containing difficult segmentation cases. Through experiments, we demonstrate that a single contour provides the same accuracy as multiple clicks, thus reducing the required amount of user interactions.
Multi-scale features are essential for dense prediction tasks, including object detection, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation. Existing state-of-the-art methods usually first extract multi-scale features by a classification backbone and then fuse these features by a lightweight module (e.g. the fusion module in FPN). However, we argue that it may not be sufficient to fuse the multi-scale features through such a paradigm, because the parameters allocated for feature fusion are limited compared with the heavy classification backbone. In order to address this issue, we propose a new architecture named Cascade Fusion Network (CFNet) for dense prediction. Besides the stem and several blocks used to extract initial high-resolution features, we introduce several cascaded stages to generate multi-scale features in CFNet. Each stage includes a sub-backbone for feature extraction and an extremely lightweight transition block for feature integration. This design makes it possible to fuse features more deeply and effectively with a large proportion of parameters of the whole backbone. Extensive experiments on object detection, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation validated the effectiveness of the proposed CFNet. Codes will be available at //github.com/zhanggang001/CFNet.
Deep neural networks have shown excellent prospects in speech separation tasks. However, obtaining good results while keeping a low model complexity remains challenging in real-world applications. In this paper, we provide a bio-inspired efficient encoder-decoder architecture by mimicking the brain's top-down attention, called TDANet, with decreased model complexity without sacrificing performance. The top-down attention in TDANet is extracted by the global attention (GA) module and the cascaded local attention (LA) layers. The GA module takes multi-scale acoustic features as input to extract global attention signal, which then modulates features of different scales by direct top-down connections. The LA layers use features of adjacent layers as input to extract the local attention signal, which is used to modulate the lateral input in a top-down manner. On three benchmark datasets, TDANet consistently achieved competitive separation performance to previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods with higher efficiency. Specifically, TDANet's multiply-accumulate operations (MACs) are only 5\% of Sepformer, one of the previous SOTA models, and CPU inference time is only 10\% of Sepformer. In addition, a large-size version of TDANet obtained SOTA results on three datasets, with MACs still only 10\% of Sepformer and the CPU inference time only 24\% of Sepformer.
Referring image segmentation aims to segment the image region of interest according to the given language expression, which is a typical multi-modal task. One of the critical challenges of this task is to align semantic representations for different modalities including vision and language. To achieve this, previous methods perform cross-modal interactions to update visual features but ignore the role of integrating fine-grained visual features into linguistic features. We present AlignFormer, an end-to-end framework for referring image segmentation. Our AlignFormer views the linguistic feature as the center embedding and segments the region of interest by pixels grouping based on the center embedding. For achieving the pixel-text alignment, we design a Vision-Language Bidirectional Attention module (VLBA) and resort contrastive learning. Concretely, the VLBA enhances visual features by propagating semantic text representations to each pixel and promotes linguistic features by fusing fine-grained image features. Moreover, we introduce the cross-modal instance contrastive loss to alleviate the influence of pixel samples in ambiguous regions and improve the ability to align multi-modal representations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our AlignFormer achieves a new state-of-the-art performance on RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, and RefCOCOg by large margins.
Convolutional neural networks (CNN) are the dominant deep neural network (DNN) architecture for computer vision. Recently, Transformer and multi-layer perceptron (MLP)-based models, such as Vision Transformer and MLP-Mixer, started to lead new trends as they showed promising results in the ImageNet classification task. In this paper, we conduct empirical studies on these DNN structures and try to understand their respective pros and cons. To ensure a fair comparison, we first develop a unified framework called SPACH which adopts separate modules for spatial and channel processing. Our experiments under the SPACH framework reveal that all structures can achieve competitive performance at a moderate scale. However, they demonstrate distinctive behaviors when the network size scales up. Based on our findings, we propose two hybrid models using convolution and Transformer modules. The resulting Hybrid-MS-S+ model achieves 83.9% top-1 accuracy with 63M parameters and 12.3G FLOPS. It is already on par with the SOTA models with sophisticated designs. The code and models will be made publicly available.
Seeking the equivalent entities among multi-source Knowledge Graphs (KGs) is the pivotal step to KGs integration, also known as \emph{entity alignment} (EA). However, most existing EA methods are inefficient and poor in scalability. A recent summary points out that some of them even require several days to deal with a dataset containing 200,000 nodes (DWY100K). We believe over-complex graph encoder and inefficient negative sampling strategy are the two main reasons. In this paper, we propose a novel KG encoder -- Dual Attention Matching Network (Dual-AMN), which not only models both intra-graph and cross-graph information smartly, but also greatly reduces computational complexity. Furthermore, we propose the Normalized Hard Sample Mining Loss to smoothly select hard negative samples with reduced loss shift. The experimental results on widely used public datasets indicate that our method achieves both high accuracy and high efficiency. On DWY100K, the whole running process of our method could be finished in 1,100 seconds, at least 10* faster than previous work. The performances of our method also outperform previous works across all datasets, where Hits@1 and MRR have been improved from 6% to 13%.
Conventionally, spatiotemporal modeling network and its complexity are the two most concentrated research topics in video action recognition. Existing state-of-the-art methods have achieved excellent accuracy regardless of the complexity meanwhile efficient spatiotemporal modeling solutions are slightly inferior in performance. In this paper, we attempt to acquire both efficiency and effectiveness simultaneously. First of all, besides traditionally treating H x W x T video frames as space-time signal (viewing from the Height-Width spatial plane), we propose to also model video from the other two Height-Time and Width-Time planes, to capture the dynamics of video thoroughly. Secondly, our model is designed based on 2D CNN backbones and model complexity is well kept in mind by design. Specifically, we introduce a novel multi-view fusion (MVF) module to exploit video dynamics using separable convolution for efficiency. It is a plug-and-play module and can be inserted into off-the-shelf 2D CNNs to form a simple yet effective model called MVFNet. Moreover, MVFNet can be thought of as a generalized video modeling framework and it can specialize to be existing methods such as C2D, SlowOnly, and TSM under different settings. Extensive experiments are conducted on popular benchmarks (i.e., Something-Something V1 & V2, Kinetics, UCF-101, and HMDB-51) to show its superiority. The proposed MVFNet can achieve state-of-the-art performance with 2D CNN's complexity.
We consider the problem of referring image segmentation. Given an input image and a natural language expression, the goal is to segment the object referred by the language expression in the image. Existing works in this area treat the language expression and the input image separately in their representations. They do not sufficiently capture long-range correlations between these two modalities. In this paper, we propose a cross-modal self-attention (CMSA) module that effectively captures the long-range dependencies between linguistic and visual features. Our model can adaptively focus on informative words in the referring expression and important regions in the input image. In addition, we propose a gated multi-level fusion module to selectively integrate self-attentive cross-modal features corresponding to different levels in the image. This module controls the information flow of features at different levels. We validate the proposed approach on four evaluation datasets. Our proposed approach consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.
Deep learning (DL) based semantic segmentation methods have been providing state-of-the-art performance in the last few years. More specifically, these techniques have been successfully applied to medical image classification, segmentation, and detection tasks. One deep learning technique, U-Net, has become one of the most popular for these applications. In this paper, we propose a Recurrent Convolutional Neural Network (RCNN) based on U-Net as well as a Recurrent Residual Convolutional Neural Network (RRCNN) based on U-Net models, which are named RU-Net and R2U-Net respectively. The proposed models utilize the power of U-Net, Residual Network, as well as RCNN. There are several advantages of these proposed architectures for segmentation tasks. First, a residual unit helps when training deep architecture. Second, feature accumulation with recurrent residual convolutional layers ensures better feature representation for segmentation tasks. Third, it allows us to design better U-Net architecture with same number of network parameters with better performance for medical image segmentation. The proposed models are tested on three benchmark datasets such as blood vessel segmentation in retina images, skin cancer segmentation, and lung lesion segmentation. The experimental results show superior performance on segmentation tasks compared to equivalent models including U-Net and residual U-Net (ResU-Net).