Most of the existing semantic segmentation approaches with image-level class labels as supervision, highly rely on the initial class activation map (CAM) generated from the standard classification network. In this paper, a novel "Progressive Patch Learning" approach is proposed to improve the local details extraction of the classification, producing the CAM better covering the whole object rather than only the most discriminative regions as in CAMs obtained in conventional classification models. "Patch Learning" destructs the feature maps into patches and independently processes each local patch in parallel before the final aggregation. Such a mechanism enforces the network to find weak information from the scattered discriminative local parts, achieving enhanced local details sensitivity. "Progressive Patch Learning" further extends the feature destruction and patch learning to multi-level granularities in a progressive manner. Cooperating with a multi-stage optimization strategy, such a "Progressive Patch Learning" mechanism implicitly provides the model with the feature extraction ability across different locality-granularities. As an alternative to the implicit multi-granularity progressive fusion approach, we additionally propose an explicit method to simultaneously fuse features from different granularities in a single model, further enhancing the CAM quality on the full object coverage. Our proposed method achieves outstanding performance on the PASCAL VOC 2012 dataset e.g., with 69.6$% mIoU on the test set), which surpasses most existing weakly supervised semantic segmentation methods. Code will be made publicly available here //github.com/TyroneLi/PPL_WSSS.
Recent breakthroughs in semi-supervised semantic segmentation have been developed through contrastive learning. In prevalent pixel-wise contrastive learning solutions, the model maps pixels to deterministic representations and regularizes them in the latent space. However, there exist inaccurate pseudo-labels which map the ambiguous representations of pixels to the wrong classes due to the limited cognitive ability of the model. In this paper, we define pixel-wise representations from a new perspective of probability theory and propose a Probabilistic Representation Contrastive Learning (PRCL) framework that improves representation quality by taking its probability into consideration. Through modeling the mapping from pixels to representations as the probability via multivariate Gaussian distributions, we can tune the contribution of the ambiguous representations to tolerate the risk of inaccurate pseudo-labels. Furthermore, we define prototypes in the form of distributions, which indicates the confidence of a class, while the point prototype cannot. Moreover, we propose to regularize the distribution variance to enhance the reliability of representations. Taking advantage of these benefits, high-quality feature representations can be derived in the latent space, thereby the performance of semantic segmentation can be further improved. We conduct sufficient experiment to evaluate PRCL on Pascal VOC and CityScapes. The comparisons with state-of-the-art approaches demonstrate the superiority of proposed PRCL.
High resolution (HR) 3D medical image segmentation plays an important role in clinical diagnoses. However, HR images are difficult to be directly processed by mainstream graphical cards due to limited video memory. Therefore, most existing 3D medical image segmentation methods use patch-based models, which ignores global context information that is useful in accurate segmentation and has low inference efficiency. To address these problems, we propose a super-resolution (SR) guided patch-free 3D medical image segmentation framework that can realize HR segmentation with global information of low-resolution (LR) input. The framework contains two tasks: semantic segmentation (main task) and super resolution (auxiliary task). To balance the information loss with the LR input, we introduce a Self-Supervised Guidance Module (SGM), which employs a selective search method to crop a HR patch from the original image as restoration guidance. Multi-scale convolutional layers are used to mitigate the scale-inconsistency between the HR guidance features and the LR features. Moreover, we propose a Task-Fusion Module (TFM) to exploit the inter connections between segmentation and SR task. This module can also be used for Test Phase Fine-tuning (TPF), leading to a better model generalization ability. When predicting, only the main segmentation task is needed, while other modules can be removed to accelerate the inference. The experiments results on two different datasets show that our framework outperforms current patch-based and patch-free models. Our model also has a four times higher inference speed compared to traditional patch-based methods. Our codes are available at: //github.com/Dootmaan/PFSeg-Full.
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 maps with four losses, i.e., class-foreground, class-background, activation suppression, and activation complementation loss. Experimental results show that our SemFormer achieves \textbf{74.3}\% mIoU and surpasses many recent mainstream WSSS approaches by a large margin on PASCAL VOC 2012 dataset. Code will be available at \url{//github.com/JLChen-C/SemFormer}.
In this paper, we propose a new approach to applying point-level annotations for weakly-supervised panoptic segmentation. Instead of the dense pixel-level labels used by fully supervised methods, point-level labels only provide a single point for each target as supervision, significantly reducing the annotation burden. We formulate the problem in an end-to-end framework by simultaneously generating panoptic pseudo-masks from point-level labels and learning from them. To tackle the core challenge, i.e., panoptic pseudo-mask generation, we propose a principled approach to parsing pixels by minimizing pixel-to-point traversing costs, which model semantic similarity, low-level texture cues, and high-level manifold knowledge to discriminate panoptic targets. We conduct experiments on the Pascal VOC and the MS COCO datasets to demonstrate the approach's effectiveness and show state-of-the-art performance in the weakly-supervised panoptic segmentation problem. Codes are available at //github.com/BraveGroup/PSPS.git.
In this paper, we focus on unsupervised learning for Video Object Segmentation (VOS) which learns visual correspondence (i.e., the similarity between pixel-level features) from unlabeled videos. Previous methods are mainly based on the contrastive learning paradigm, which optimize either in image level or pixel level. Image-level optimization (e.g., the spatially pooled feature of ResNet) learns robust high-level semantics but is sub-optimal since the pixel-level features are optimized implicitly. By contrast, pixel-level optimization is more explicit, however, it is sensitive to the visual quality of training data and is not robust to object deformation. To complementarily perform these two levels of optimization in a unified framework, we propose the In-aNd-Out (INO) generative learning from a purely generative perspective with the help of naturally designed class tokens and patch tokens in Vision Transformer (ViT). Specifically, for image-level optimization, we force the out-view imagination from local to global views on class tokens, which helps capture high-level semantics, and we name it as out-generative learning. As to pixel-level optimization, we perform in-view masked image modeling on patch tokens, which recovers the corrupted parts of an image via inferring its fine-grained structure, and we term it as in-generative learning. To discover the temporal information better, we additionally force the inter-frame consistency from both feature and affinity matrix levels. Extensive experiments on DAVIS-2017 val and YouTube-VOS 2018 val show that our INO outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods by significant margins. Code is available: //github.com/pansanity666/INO_VOS
Few-shot segmentation (FSS) aims to segment unseen classes using a few annotated samples. Typically, a prototype representing the foreground class is extracted from annotated support image(s) and is matched to features representing each pixel in the query image. However, models learnt in this way are insufficiently discriminatory, and often produce false positives: misclassifying background pixels as foreground. Some FSS methods try to address this issue by using the background in the support image(s) to help identify the background in the query image. However, the backgrounds of theses images is often quite distinct, and hence, the support image background information is uninformative. This article proposes a method, QSR, that extracts the background from the query image itself, and as a result is better able to discriminate between foreground and background features in the query image. This is achieved by modifying the training process to associate prototypes with class labels including known classes from the training data and latent classes representing unknown background objects. This class information is then used to extract a background prototype from the query image. To successfully associate prototypes with class labels and extract a background prototype that is capable of predicting a mask for the background regions of the image, the machinery for extracting and using foreground prototypes is induced to become more discriminative between different classes. Experiments for both 1-shot and 5-shot FSS on both the PASCAL-5i and COCO-20i datasets demonstrate that the proposed method results in a significant improvement in performance for the baseline methods it is applied to. As QSR operates only during training, these improved results are produced with no extra computational complexity during testing.
Unsupervised image segmentation is an important task in many real-world scenarios where labelled data is of scarce availability. In this paper we propose a novel approach that harnesses recent advances in unsupervised learning using a combination of Mutual Information Maximization (MIM), Neural Superpixel Segmentation and Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) in an end-to-end manner, an approach that has not been explored yet. We take advantage of the compact representation of superpixels and combine it with GNNs in order to learn strong and semantically meaningful representations of images. Specifically, we show that our GNN based approach allows to model interactions between distant pixels in the image and serves as a strong prior to existing CNNs for an improved accuracy. Our experiments reveal both the qualitative and quantitative advantages of our approach compared to current state-of-the-art methods over four popular datasets.
Inspired by the human cognitive system, attention is a mechanism that imitates the human cognitive awareness about specific information, amplifying critical details to focus more on the essential aspects of data. Deep learning has employed attention to boost performance for many applications. Interestingly, the same attention design can suit processing different data modalities and can easily be incorporated into large networks. Furthermore, multiple complementary attention mechanisms can be incorporated in one network. Hence, attention techniques have become extremely attractive. However, the literature lacks a comprehensive survey specific to attention techniques to guide researchers in employing attention in their deep models. Note that, besides being demanding in terms of training data and computational resources, transformers only cover a single category in self-attention out of the many categories available. We fill this gap and provide an in-depth survey of 50 attention techniques categorizing them by their most prominent features. We initiate our discussion by introducing the fundamental concepts behind the success of attention mechanism. Next, we furnish some essentials such as the strengths and limitations of each attention category, describe their fundamental building blocks, basic formulations with primary usage, and applications specifically for computer vision. We also discuss the challenges and open questions related to attention mechanism in general. Finally, we recommend possible future research directions for deep attention.
Medical image segmentation requires consensus ground truth segmentations to be derived from multiple expert annotations. A novel approach is proposed that obtains consensus segmentations from experts using graph cuts (GC) and semi supervised learning (SSL). Popular approaches use iterative Expectation Maximization (EM) to estimate the final annotation and quantify annotator's performance. Such techniques pose the risk of getting trapped in local minima. We propose a self consistency (SC) score to quantify annotator consistency using low level image features. SSL is used to predict missing annotations by considering global features and local image consistency. The SC score also serves as the penalty cost in a second order Markov random field (MRF) cost function optimized using graph cuts to derive the final consensus label. Graph cut obtains a global maximum without an iterative procedure. Experimental results on synthetic images, real data of Crohn's disease patients and retinal images show our final segmentation to be accurate and more consistent than competing methods.
Recently, deep learning has achieved very promising results in visual object tracking. Deep neural networks in existing tracking methods require a lot of training data to learn a large number of parameters. However, training data is not sufficient for visual object tracking as annotations of a target object are only available in the first frame of a test sequence. In this paper, we propose to learn hierarchical features for visual object tracking by using tree structure based Recursive Neural Networks (RNN), which have fewer parameters than other deep neural networks, e.g. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). First, we learn RNN parameters to discriminate between the target object and background in the first frame of a test sequence. Tree structure over local patches of an exemplar region is randomly generated by using a bottom-up greedy search strategy. Given the learned RNN parameters, we create two dictionaries regarding target regions and corresponding local patches based on the learned hierarchical features from both top and leaf nodes of multiple random trees. In each of the subsequent frames, we conduct sparse dictionary coding on all candidates to select the best candidate as the new target location. In addition, we online update two dictionaries to handle appearance changes of target objects. Experimental results demonstrate that our feature learning algorithm can significantly improve tracking performance on benchmark datasets.