Robotic grasping in the open world is a critical component of manufacturing and automation processes. While numerous existing approaches depend on 2D segmentation output to facilitate the grasping procedure, accurately determining depth from 2D imagery remains a challenge, often leading to limited performance in complex stacking scenarios. In contrast, techniques utilizing 3D point cloud data inherently capture depth information, thus enabling adeptly navigating and manipulating a diverse range of complex stacking scenes. However, such efforts are considerably hindered by the variance in data capture devices and the unstructured nature of the data, which limits their generalizability. Consequently, much research is narrowly concentrated on managing designated objects within specific settings, which confines their real-world applicability. This paper presents a novel pipeline capable of executing object grasping tasks in open-world scenarios even on previously unseen objects without the necessity for training. Additionally, our pipeline supports the flexible use of different 3D point cloud segmentation models across a variety of scenes. Leveraging the segmentation results, we propose to engage a training-free binary clustering algorithm that not only improves segmentation precision but also possesses the capability to cluster and localize unseen objects for executing grasping operations. In our experiments, we investigate a range of open-world scenarios, and the outcomes underscore the remarkable robustness and generalizability of our pipeline, consistent across various environments, robots, cameras, and objects. The code will be made available upon acceptance of the paper.
Recently, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has achieved significant performance on indoor surface reconstruction and open-vocabulary segmentation. This paper presents GLS, a unified framework of surface reconstruction and open-vocabulary segmentation based on 3DGS. GLS extends two fields by exploring the correlation between them. For indoor surface reconstruction, we introduce surface normal prior as a geometric cue to guide the rendered normal, and use the normal error to optimize the rendered depth. For open-vocabulary segmentation, we employ 2D CLIP features to guide instance features and utilize DEVA masks to enhance their view consistency. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of jointly optimizing surface reconstruction and open-vocabulary segmentation, where GLS surpasses state-of-the-art approaches of each task on MuSHRoom, ScanNet++, and LERF-OVS datasets. Code will be available at https://github.com/JiaxiongQ/GLS.
Tropical forests play an essential role in the planet's ecosystem, making the conservation of these biomes a worldwide priority. However, ongoing deforestation and degradation pose a significant threat to their existence, necessitating effective monitoring and the proposal of actions to mitigate the damage caused by these processes. In this regard, initiatives range from government and private sector monitoring programs to solutions based on citizen science campaigns, for example. Particularly in the context of citizen science campaigns, the segmentation of remote sensing images to identify deforested areas and subsequently submit them to analysis by non-specialized volunteers is necessary. Thus, segmentation using superpixel-based techniques proves to be a viable solution for this important task. Therefore, this paper presents an analysis of 22 superpixel-based segmentation methods applied to remote sensing images, aiming to identify which of them are more suitable for generating segments for citizen science campaigns. The results reveal that seven of the segmentation methods outperformed the baseline method (SLIC) currently employed in the ForestEyes citizen science project, indicating an opportunity for improvement in this important stage of campaign development.
Purpose: Endoscopic surgical environments present challenges for dissection zone segmentation due to unclear boundaries between tissue types, leading to segmentation errors where models misidentify or overlook edges. This study aims to provide precise dissection zone suggestions during endoscopic submucosal dissection (ESD) procedures, enhancing ESD safety. Methods: We propose the Prompted-based Dissection Zone Segmentation (PDZSeg) model, designed to leverage diverse visual prompts such as scribbles and bounding boxes. By overlaying these prompts onto images and fine-tuning a foundational model on a specialized dataset, our approach improves segmentation performance and user experience through flexible input methods. Results: The PDZSeg model was validated using three experimental setups: in-domain evaluation, variability in visual prompt availability, and robustness assessment. Using the ESD-DZSeg dataset, results show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art segmentation approaches. This is the first study to integrate visual prompt design into dissection zone segmentation. Conclusion: The PDZSeg model effectively utilizes visual prompts to enhance segmentation performance and user experience, supported by the novel ESD-DZSeg dataset as a benchmark for dissection zone segmentation in ESD. Our work establishes a foundation for future research.
This paper contributes to the "BraTS 2024 Brain MR Image Synthesis Challenge" and presents a conditional Wavelet Diffusion Model (cWDM) for directly solving a paired image-to-image translation task on high-resolution volumes. While deep learning-based brain tumor segmentation models have demonstrated clear clinical utility, they typically require MR scans from various modalities (T1, T1ce, T2, FLAIR) as input. However, due to time constraints or imaging artifacts, some of these modalities may be missing, hindering the application of well-performing segmentation algorithms in clinical routine. To address this issue, we propose a method that synthesizes one missing modality image conditioned on three available images, enabling the application of downstream segmentation models. We treat this paired image-to-image translation task as a conditional generation problem and solve it by combining a Wavelet Diffusion Model for high-resolution 3D image synthesis with a simple conditioning strategy. This approach allows us to directly apply our model to full-resolution volumes, avoiding artifacts caused by slice- or patch-wise data processing. While this work focuses on a specific application, the presented method can be applied to all kinds of paired image-to-image translation problems, such as CT $\leftrightarrow$ MR and MR $\leftrightarrow$ PET translation, or mask-conditioned anatomically guided image generation.
Terraced field is a significant engineering practice for soil and water conservation (SWC). Terraced field extraction from remotely sensed imagery is the foundation for monitoring and evaluating SWC. This study is the first to propose a novel dual-modal {\Omega}-like super-resolution Transformer network for intelligent TFVE, offering the following advantages: (1) reducing edge segmentation error from conventional multi-scale downsampling encoder, through fusing original high-resolution features with downsampling features at each step of encoder and leveraging a multi-head attention mechanism; (2) improving the accuracy of TFVE by proposing a {\Omega}-like network structure, which fully integrates rich high-level features from both spectral and terrain data to form cross-scale super-resolution features; (3) validating an optimal fusion scheme for cross-modal and cross-scale (i.e., inconsistent spatial resolution between remotely sensed imagery and DEM) super-resolution feature extraction; (4) mitigating uncertainty between segmentation edge pixels by a coarse-to-fine and spatial topological semantic relationship optimization (STSRO) segmentation strategy; (5) leveraging contour vibration neural network to continuously optimize parameters and iteratively vectorize terraced fields from semantic segmentation results. Moreover, a DMRVD for deep-learning-based TFVE was created for the first time, which covers nine study areas in four provinces of China, with a total coverage area of 22441 square kilometers. To assess the performance of {\Omega}SFormer, classic and SOTA networks were compared. The mIOU of {\Omega}SFormer has improved by 0.165, 0.297 and 0.128 respectively, when compared with best accuracy single-modal remotely sensed imagery, single-modal DEM and dual-modal result.
The Vision Transformer (ViT) has achieved notable success in computer vision, with its variants extensively validated across various downstream tasks, including semantic segmentation. However, designed as general-purpose visual encoders, ViT backbones often overlook the specific needs of task decoders, revealing opportunities to design decoders tailored to efficient semantic segmentation. This paper proposes Strip Cross-Attention (SCASeg), an innovative decoder head explicitly designed for semantic segmentation. Instead of relying on the simple conventional skip connections, we employ lateral connections between the encoder and decoder stages, using encoder features as Queries for the cross-attention modules. Additionally, we introduce a Cross-Layer Block that blends hierarchical feature maps from different encoder and decoder stages to create a unified representation for Keys and Values. To further boost computational efficiency, SCASeg compresses queries and keys into strip-like patterns to optimize memory usage and inference speed over the traditional vanilla cross-attention. Moreover, the Cross-Layer Block incorporates the local perceptual strengths of convolution, enabling SCASeg to capture both global and local context dependencies across multiple layers. This approach facilitates effective feature interaction at different scales, improving the overall performance. Experiments show that the adaptable decoder of SCASeg produces competitive performance across different setups, surpassing leading segmentation architectures on all benchmark datasets, including ADE20K, Cityscapes, COCO-Stuff 164k, and Pascal VOC2012, even under varying computational limitations.
Segmenting glomerular intraglomerular tissue and lesions traditionally depends on detailed morphological evaluations by expert nephropathologists, a labor-intensive process susceptible to interobserver variability. Our group previously developed the Glo-In-One toolkit for integrated detection and segmentation of glomeruli. In this study, we leverage the Glo-In-One toolkit to version 2 with fine-grained segmentation capabilities, curating 14 distinct labels for tissue regions, cells, and lesions across a dataset of 23,529 annotated glomeruli across human and mouse histopathology data. To our knowledge, this dataset is among the largest of its kind to date.In this study, we present a single dynamic head deep learning architecture designed to segment 14 classes within partially labeled images of human and mouse pathology data. Our model was trained using a training set derived from 368 annotated kidney whole-slide images (WSIs) to identify 5 key intraglomerular tissues covering Bowman's capsule, glomerular tuft, mesangium, mesangial cells, and podocytes. Additionally, the network segments 9 glomerular lesion classes including adhesion, capsular drop, global sclerosis, hyalinosis, mesangial lysis, microaneurysm, nodular sclerosis, mesangial expansion, and segmental sclerosis. The glomerulus segmentation model achieved a decent performance compared with baselines, and achieved a 76.5 % average Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC). Additional, transfer learning from rodent to human for glomerular lesion segmentation model has enhanced the average segmentation accuracy across different types of lesions by more than 3 %, as measured by Dice scores. The Glo-In-One-v2 model and trained weight have been made publicly available at https: //github.com/hrlblab/Glo-In-One_v2.
This study introduces SAMatch, a SAM-guided Match-based framework for semi-supervised medical image segmentation, aimed at improving pseudo label quality in data-scarce scenarios. While Match-based frameworks are effective, they struggle with low-quality pseudo labels due to the absence of ground truth. SAM, pre-trained on a large dataset, generalizes well across diverse tasks and assists in generating high-confidence prompts, which are then used to refine pseudo labels via fine-tuned SAM. SAMatch is trained end-to-end, allowing for dynamic interaction between the models. Experiments on the ACDC cardiac MRI, BUSI breast ultrasound, and MRLiver datasets show SAMatch achieving state-of-the-art results, with Dice scores of 89.36%, 77.76%, and 80.04%, respectively, using minimal labeled data. SAMatch effectively addresses challenges in semi-supervised segmentation, offering a powerful tool for segmentation in data-limited environments. Code and data are available at https://github.com/apple1986/SAMatch.
This article describes the development of a novel U-Net-enhanced Wavelet Neural Operator (U-WNO),which combines wavelet decomposition, operator learning, and an encoder-decoder mechanism. This approach harnesses the superiority of the wavelets in time frequency localization of the functions, and the combine down-sampling and up-sampling operations to generate the segmentation map to enable accurate tracking of patterns in spatial domain and effective learning of the functional mappings to perform regional segmentation. By bridging the gap between theoretical advancements and practical applications, the U-WNO holds potential for significant impact in multiple science and industrial fields, facilitating more accurate decision-making and improved operational efficiencies. The operator is demonstrated for different pregnancy trimesters, utilizing two-dimensional ultrasound images.
The integration of machine learning in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), specifically in neuroimaging, is proving to be incredibly effective, leading to better diagnostic accuracy, accelerated image analysis, and data-driven insights, which can potentially transform patient care. Deep learning models utilize multiple layers of processing to capture intricate details of complex data, which can then be used on a variety of tasks, including brain tumor classification, segmentation, image synthesis, and registration. Previous research demonstrates high accuracy in tumor segmentation using various model architectures, including nn-UNet and Swin-UNet. U-Mamba, which uses state space modeling, also achieves high accuracy in medical image segmentation. To leverage these models, we propose a deep learning framework that ensembles these state-of-the-art architectures to achieve accurate segmentation and produce finely synthesized images.
This paper aims to address universal segmentation for image and video perception with the strong reasoning ability empowered by Visual Large Language Models (VLLMs). Despite significant progress in current unified segmentation methods, limitations in adaptation to both image and video scenarios, as well as the complex reasoning segmentation, make it difficult for them to handle various challenging instructions and achieve an accurate understanding of fine-grained vision-language correlations. We propose HyperSeg, the first VLLM-based universal segmentation model for pixel-level image and video perception, encompassing generic segmentation tasks and more complex reasoning perception tasks requiring powerful reasoning abilities and world knowledge. Besides, to fully leverage the recognition capabilities of VLLMs and the fine-grained visual information, HyperSeg incorporates hybrid entity recognition and fine-grained visual perceiver modules for various segmentation tasks. Combined with the temporal adapter, HyperSeg achieves a comprehensive understanding of temporal information. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of our insights in resolving universal image and video segmentation tasks, including the more complex reasoning perception tasks. Our code is available.
White Matter Hyperintensities (WMH) are key neuroradiological markers of small vessel disease present in brain MRI. Assessment of WMH is important in research and clinics. However, WMH are challenging to segment due to their high variability in shape, location, size, poorly defined borders, and similar intensity profile to other pathologies (e.g stroke lesions) and artefacts (e.g head motion). In this work, we apply the most effective techniques for uncertainty quantification (UQ) in segmentation to the WMH segmentation task across multiple test-time data distributions. We find a combination of Stochastic Segmentation Networks with Deep Ensembles yields the highest Dice and lowest Absolute Volume Difference % (AVD) score on in-domain and out-of-distribution data. We demonstrate the downstream utility of UQ, proposing a novel method for classification of the clinical Fazekas score using spatial features extracted for WMH segmentation and UQ maps. We show that incorporating WMH uncertainty information improves Fazekas classification performance and calibration, with median class balanced accuracy for classification models with (UQ and spatial WMH features)/(spatial WMH features)/(WMH volume only) of 0.71/0.66/0.60 in the Deep WMH and 0.82/0.77/0.73 in the Periventricular WMH regions respectively. We demonstrate that stochastic UQ techniques with high sample diversity can improve the detection of poor quality segmentations. Finally, we qualitatively analyse the semantic information captured by UQ techniques and demonstrate that uncertainty can highlight areas where there is ambiguity between WMH and stroke lesions, while identifying clusters of small WMH in deep white matter unsegmented by the model.
Incorporating modern computer vision techniques into clinical protocols shows promise in improving skin lesion segmentation. The U-Net architecture has been a key model in this area, iteratively improved to address challenges arising from the heterogeneity of dermatologic images due to varying clinical settings, lighting, patient attributes, and hair density. To further improve skin lesion segmentation, we developed TAFM-Net, an innovative model leveraging self-adaptive transformer attention (TA) coupled with focal modulation (FM). Our model integrates an EfficientNetV2B1 encoder, which employs TA to enhance spatial and channel-related saliency, while a densely connected decoder integrates FM within skip connections, enhancing feature emphasis, segmentation performance, and interpretability crucial for medical image analysis. A novel dynamic loss function amalgamates region and boundary information, guiding effective model training. Our model achieves competitive performance, with Jaccard coefficients of 93.64\%, 86.88\% and 92.88\% in the ISIC2016, ISIC2017 and ISIC2018 datasets, respectively, demonstrating its potential in real-world scenarios.
Segmenting 3D blood vessels is a critical yet challenging task in medical image analysis. This is due to significant imaging modality-specific variations in artifacts, vascular patterns and scales, signal-to-noise ratios, and background tissues. These variations, along with domain gaps arising from varying imaging protocols, limit the generalization of existing supervised learning-based methods, requiring tedious voxel-level annotations for each dataset separately. While foundation models promise to alleviate this limitation, they typically fail to generalize to the task of blood vessel segmentation, posing a unique, complex problem. In this work, we present vesselFM, a foundation model designed specifically for the broad task of 3D blood vessel segmentation. Unlike previous models, vesselFM can effortlessly generalize to unseen domains. To achieve zero-shot generalization, we train vesselFM on three heterogeneous data sources: a large, curated annotated dataset, data generated by a domain randomization scheme, and data sampled from a flow matching-based generative model. Extensive evaluations show that vesselFM outperforms state-of-the-art medical image segmentation foundation models across four (pre-)clinically relevant imaging modalities in zero-, one-, and few-shot scenarios, therefore providing a universal solution for 3D blood vessel segmentation.
Medical image segmentation often faces the challenge of prohibitively expensive annotation costs. While few-shot learning offers a promising solution to alleviate this burden, conventional approaches still rely heavily on pre-training with large volumes of labeled data from known categories. To address this issue, we propose leveraging the Segment Anything Model (SAM), pre-trained on over 1 billion masks, thus circumventing the need for extensive domain-specific annotated data. In light of this, we developed SAM-MPA, an innovative SAM-based framework for few-shot medical image segmentation using Mask Propagation-based Auto-prompting. Initially, we employ k-centroid clustering to select the most representative examples for labelling to construct the support set. These annotated examples are registered to other images yielding deformation fields that facilitate the propagation of the mask knowledge to obtain coarse masks across the dataset. Subsequently, we automatically generate visual prompts based on the region and boundary expansion of the coarse mask, including points, box and a coarse mask. Finally, we can obtain the segmentation predictions by inputting these prompts into SAM and refine the results by post refinement module. We validate the performance of the proposed framework through extensive experiments conducted on two medical image datasets with different modalities. Our method achieves Dices of 74.53%, 94.36% on Breast US, Chest X-ray, respectively. Experimental results substantiate that SAM-MPA yields high-accuracy segmentations within 10 labeled examples, outperforming other state-of-the-art few-shot auto-segmentation methods. Our method enables the customization of SAM for any medical image dataset with a small number of labeled examples.
Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans) is an excellent model organism because of its short lifespan and high degree of homology with human genes, and it has been widely used in a variety of human health and disease models. However, the segmentation of C. elegans remains challenging due to the following reasons: 1) the activity trajectory of C. elegans is uncontrollable, and multiple nematodes often overlap, resulting in blurred boundaries of C. elegans. This makes it impossible to clearly study the life trajectory of a certain nematode; and 2) in the microscope images of overlapping C. elegans, the translucent tissues at the edges obscure each other, leading to inaccurate boundary segmentation. To solve these problems, a Bilayer Segmentation-Recombination Network (BR-Net) for the segmentation of C. elegans instances is proposed. The network consists of three parts: A Coarse Mask Segmentation Module (CMSM), a Bilayer Segmentation Module (BSM), and a Semantic Consistency Recombination Module (SCRM). The CMSM is used to extract the coarse mask, and we introduce a Unified Attention Module (UAM) in CMSM to make CMSM better aware of nematode instances. The Bilayer Segmentation Module (BSM) segments the aggregated C. elegans into overlapping and non-overlapping regions. This is followed by integration by the SCRM, where semantic consistency regularization is introduced to segment nematode instances more accurately. Finally, the effectiveness of the method is verified on the C. elegans dataset. The experimental results show that BR-Net exhibits good competitiveness and outperforms other recently proposed instance segmentation methods in processing C. elegans occlusion images.
The article discusses the use of low cost System-On-Module (SOM) platforms for the implementation of efficient hyperspectral imaging (HSI) processors for application in autonomous driving. The work addresses the challenges of shaping and deploying multiple layer fully convolutional networks (FCN) for low-latency, on-board image semantic segmentation using resource- and power-constrained processing devices. The paper describes in detail the steps followed to redesign and customize a successfully trained HSI segmentation lightweight FCN that was previously tested on a high-end heterogeneous multiprocessing system-on-chip (MPSoC) to accommodate it to the constraints imposed by a low-cost SOM. This SOM features a lower-end but much cheaper MPSoC suitable for the deployment of automatic driving systems (ADS). In particular the article reports the data- and hardware-specific quantization techniques utilized to fit the FCN into a commercial fixed-point programmable AI coprocessor IP, and proposes a full customized post-training quantization scheme to reduce computation and storage costs without compromising segmentation accuracy.
We introduce a training-free method for feature field rendering in Gaussian splatting. Our approach back-projects 2D features into pre-trained 3D Gaussians, using a weighted sum based on each Gaussian's influence in the final rendering. While most training-based feature field rendering methods excel at 2D segmentation but perform poorly at 3D segmentation without post-processing, our method achieves high-quality results in both 2D and 3D segmentation. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach is fast, scalable, and offers performance comparable to training-based methods.
Autonomous driving needs good roads, but 85% of Brazilian roads have damages that deep learning models may not regard as most semantic segmentation datasets for autonomous driving are high-resolution images of well-maintained urban roads. A representative dataset for emerging countries consists of low-resolution images of poorly maintained roads and includes labels of damage classes; in this scenario, three challenges arise: objects with few pixels, objects with undefined shapes, and highly underrepresented classes. To tackle these challenges, this work proposes the Performance Increment Strategy for Semantic Segmentation (PISSS) as a methodology of 14 training experiments to boost performance. With PISSS, we reached state-of-the-art results of 79.8 and 68.8 mIoU on the Road Traversing Knowledge (RTK) and Technik Autonomer Systeme 500 (TAS500) test sets, respectively. Furthermore, we also offer an analysis of DeepLabV3+ pitfalls for small object segmentation.