Most methods for automated full-bore rock core image analysis (description, colour, properties distribution, etc.) are based on separate core column analyses. The core is usually imaged in a box because of the significant amount of time taken to get an image for each core column. The work presents an innovative method and algorithm for core columns extraction from core boxes. The conditions for core boxes imaging may differ tremendously. Such differences are disastrous for machine learning algorithms which need a large dataset describing all possible data variations. Still, such images have some standard features - a box and core. Thus, we can emulate different environments with a unique augmentation described in this work. It is called template-like augmentation (TLA). The method is described and tested on various environments, and results are compared on an algorithm trained on both 'traditional' data and a mix of traditional and TLA data. The algorithm trained with TLA data provides better metrics and can detect core on most new images, unlike the algorithm trained on data without TLA. The algorithm for core column extraction implemented in an automated core description system speeds up the core box processing by a factor of 20.
Unets have become the standard method for semantic segmentation of medical images, along with fully convolutional networks (FCN). Unet++ was introduced as a variant of Unet, in order to solve some of the problems facing Unet and FCNs. Unet++ provided networks with an ensemble of variable depth Unets, hence eliminating the need for professionals estimating the best suitable depth for a task. While Unet and all its variants, including Unet++ aimed at providing networks that were able to train well without requiring large quantities of annotated data, none of them attempted to eliminate the need for pixel-wise annotated data altogether. Obtaining such data for each disease to be diagnosed comes at a high cost. Hence such data is scarce. In this paper we use contrastive learning to train Unet++ for semantic segmentation of medical images using medical images from various sources including magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and computed tomography (CT), without the need for pixel-wise annotations. Here we describe the architecture of the proposed model and the training method used. This is still a work in progress and so we abstain from including results in this paper. The results and the trained model would be made available upon publication or in subsequent versions of this paper on arxiv.
Deep learning based techniques achieve state-of-the-art results in a wide range of image reconstruction tasks like compressed sensing. These methods almost always have hyperparameters, such as the weight coefficients that balance the different terms in the optimized loss function. The typical approach is to train the model for a hyperparameter setting determined with some empirical or theoretical justification. Thus, at inference time, the model can only compute reconstructions corresponding to the pre-determined hyperparameter values. In this work, we present a hypernetwork-based approach, called HyperRecon, to train reconstruction models that are agnostic to hyperparameter settings. At inference time, HyperRecon can efficiently produce diverse reconstructions, which would each correspond to different hyperparameter values. In this framework, the user is empowered to select the most useful output(s) based on their own judgement. We demonstrate our method in compressed sensing, super-resolution and denoising tasks, using two large-scale and publicly-available MRI datasets. Our code is available at //github.com/alanqrwang/hyperrecon.
In this thesis, I investigated and enhanced the visual counting task, which automatically estimates the number of objects in still images or video frames. Recently, due to the growing interest in it, several CNN-based solutions have been suggested by the scientific community. These artificial neural networks provide a way to automatically learn effective representations from raw visual data and can be successfully employed to address typical challenges characterizing this task, such as different illuminations and object scales. But apart from these difficulties, I targeted some other crucial limitations in the adoption of CNNs, proposing solutions that I experimentally evaluated in the context of the counting task which turns out to be particularly affected by these shortcomings. In particular, I tackled the problem related to the lack of data needed for training current CNN-based solutions. Given that the budget for labeling is limited, data scarcity still represents an open problem, particularly evident in tasks such as the counting one, where the objects to be labeled are thousands per image. Specifically, I introduced synthetic datasets gathered from virtual environments, where the training labels are automatically collected. I proposed Domain Adaptation strategies aiming at mitigating the domain gap existing between the training and test data distributions. I presented a counting strategy where I took advantage of the redundant information characterizing datasets labeled by multiple annotators. Moreover, I tackled the engineering challenges coming out of the adoption of CNN techniques in environments with limited power resources. I introduced solutions for counting vehicles directly onboard embedded vision systems. Finally, I designed an embedded modular Computer Vision-based system that can carry out several tasks to help monitor individual and collective human safety rules.
Connecting Vision and Language plays an essential role in Generative Intelligence. For this reason, in the last few years, a large research effort has been devoted to image captioning, i.e. the task of describing images with syntactically and semantically meaningful sentences. Starting from 2015 the task has generally been addressed with pipelines composed of a visual encoding step and a language model for text generation. During these years, both components have evolved considerably through the exploitation of object regions, attributes, and relationships and the introduction of multi-modal connections, fully-attentive approaches, and BERT-like early-fusion strategies. However, regardless of the impressive results obtained, research in image captioning has not reached a conclusive answer yet. This work aims at providing a comprehensive overview and categorization of image captioning approaches, from visual encoding and text generation to training strategies, used datasets, and evaluation metrics. In this respect, we quantitatively compare many relevant state-of-the-art approaches to identify the most impactful technical innovations in image captioning architectures and training strategies. Moreover, many variants of the problem and its open challenges are analyzed and discussed. The final goal of this work is to serve as a tool for understanding the existing state-of-the-art and highlighting the future directions for an area of research where Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing can find an optimal synergy.
Data augmentation, the artificial creation of training data for machine learning by transformations, is a widely studied research field across machine learning disciplines. While it is useful for increasing the generalization capabilities of a model, it can also address many other challenges and problems, from overcoming a limited amount of training data over regularizing the objective to limiting the amount data used to protect privacy. Based on a precise description of the goals and applications of data augmentation (C1) and a taxonomy for existing works (C2), this survey is concerned with data augmentation methods for textual classification and aims to achieve a concise and comprehensive overview for researchers and practitioners (C3). Derived from the taxonomy, we divided more than 100 methods into 12 different groupings and provide state-of-the-art references expounding which methods are highly promising (C4). Finally, research perspectives that may constitute a building block for future work are given (C5).
A key requirement for the success of supervised deep learning is a large labeled dataset - a condition that is difficult to meet in medical image analysis. Self-supervised learning (SSL) can help in this regard by providing a strategy to pre-train a neural network with unlabeled data, followed by fine-tuning for a downstream task with limited annotations. Contrastive learning, a particular variant of SSL, is a powerful technique for learning image-level representations. In this work, we propose strategies for extending the contrastive learning framework for segmentation of volumetric medical images in the semi-supervised setting with limited annotations, by leveraging domain-specific and problem-specific cues. Specifically, we propose (1) novel contrasting strategies that leverage structural similarity across volumetric medical images (domain-specific cue) and (2) a local version of the contrastive loss to learn distinctive representations of local regions that are useful for per-pixel segmentation (problem-specific cue). We carry out an extensive evaluation on three Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) datasets. In the limited annotation setting, the proposed method yields substantial improvements compared to other self-supervision and semi-supervised learning techniques. When combined with a simple data augmentation technique, the proposed method reaches within 8% of benchmark performance using only two labeled MRI volumes for training, corresponding to only 4% (for ACDC) of the training data used to train the benchmark.
Modern neural network training relies heavily on data augmentation for improved generalization. After the initial success of label-preserving augmentations, there has been a recent surge of interest in label-perturbing approaches, which combine features and labels across training samples to smooth the learned decision surface. In this paper, we propose a new augmentation method that leverages the first and second moments extracted and re-injected by feature normalization. We replace the moments of the learned features of one training image by those of another, and also interpolate the target labels. As our approach is fast, operates entirely in feature space, and mixes different signals than prior methods, one can effectively combine it with existing augmentation methods. We demonstrate its efficacy across benchmark data sets in computer vision, speech, and natural language processing, where it consistently improves the generalization performance of highly competitive baseline networks.
Deep learning applies multiple processing layers to learn representations of data with multiple levels of feature extraction. This emerging technique has reshaped the research landscape of face recognition since 2014, launched by the breakthroughs of Deepface and DeepID methods. Since then, deep face recognition (FR) technique, which leverages the hierarchical architecture to learn discriminative face representation, has dramatically improved the state-of-the-art performance and fostered numerous successful real-world applications. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey of the recent developments on deep FR, covering the broad topics on algorithms, data, and scenes. First, we summarize different network architectures and loss functions proposed in the rapid evolution of the deep FR methods. Second, the related face processing methods are categorized into two classes: `one-to-many augmentation' and `many-to-one normalization'. Then, we summarize and compare the commonly used databases for both model training and evaluation. Third, we review miscellaneous scenes in deep FR, such as cross-factor, heterogenous, multiple-media and industry scenes. Finally, potential deficiencies of the current methods and several future directions are highlighted.
Recent advances in 3D fully convolutional networks (FCN) have made it feasible to produce dense voxel-wise predictions of volumetric images. In this work, we show that a multi-class 3D FCN trained on manually labeled CT scans of several anatomical structures (ranging from the large organs to thin vessels) can achieve competitive segmentation results, while avoiding the need for handcrafting features or training class-specific models. To this end, we propose a two-stage, coarse-to-fine approach that will first use a 3D FCN to roughly define a candidate region, which will then be used as input to a second 3D FCN. This reduces the number of voxels the second FCN has to classify to ~10% and allows it to focus on more detailed segmentation of the organs and vessels. We utilize training and validation sets consisting of 331 clinical CT images and test our models on a completely unseen data collection acquired at a different hospital that includes 150 CT scans, targeting three anatomical organs (liver, spleen, and pancreas). In challenging organs such as the pancreas, our cascaded approach improves the mean Dice score from 68.5 to 82.2%, achieving the highest reported average score on this dataset. We compare with a 2D FCN method on a separate dataset of 240 CT scans with 18 classes and achieve a significantly higher performance in small organs and vessels. Furthermore, we explore fine-tuning our models to different datasets. Our experiments illustrate the promise and robustness of current 3D FCN based semantic segmentation of medical images, achieving state-of-the-art results. Our code and trained models are available for download: //github.com/holgerroth/3Dunet_abdomen_cascade.
Image segmentation is an important component of many image understanding systems. It aims to group pixels in a spatially and perceptually coherent manner. Typically, these algorithms have a collection of parameters that control the degree of over-segmentation produced. It still remains a challenge to properly select such parameters for human-like perceptual grouping. In this work, we exploit the diversity of segments produced by different choices of parameters. We scan the segmentation parameter space and generate a collection of image segmentation hypotheses (from highly over-segmented to under-segmented). These are fed into a cost minimization framework that produces the final segmentation by selecting segments that: (1) better describe the natural contours of the image, and (2) are more stable and persistent among all the segmentation hypotheses. We compare our algorithm's performance with state-of-the-art algorithms, showing that we can achieve improved results. We also show that our framework is robust to the choice of segmentation kernel that produces the initial set of hypotheses.