Recently, label consistent k-svd (LC-KSVD) algorithm has been successfully applied in image classification. The objective function of LC-KSVD is consisted of reconstruction error, classification error and discriminative sparse codes error with L0-norm sparse regularization term. The L0-norm, however, leads to NP-hard problem. Despite some methods such as orthogonal matching pursuit can help solve this problem to some extent, it is quite difficult to find the optimum sparse solution. To overcome this limitation, we propose a label embedded dictionary learning (LEDL) method to utilise the L1-norm as the sparse regularization term so that we can avoid the hard-to-optimize problem by solving the convex optimization problem. Alternating direction method of multipliers and blockwise coordinate descent algorithm are then exploited to optimize the corresponding objective function. Extensive experimental results on six benchmark datasets illustrate that the proposed algorithm has achieved superior performance compared to some conventional classification algorithms.
Image augmentation techniques have been widely investigated to improve the performance of deep learning (DL) algorithms on mammography classification tasks. Recent methods have proved the efficiency of image augmentation on data deficiency or data imbalance issues. In this paper, we propose a novel transparency strategy to boost the Breast Imaging Reporting and Data System (BI-RADS) scores of mammogram classifiers. The proposed approach utilizes the Region of Interest (ROI) information to generate more high-risk training examples for breast cancer (BI-RADS 3, 4, 5) from original images. Our extensive experiments on three different datasets show that the proposed approach significantly improves the mammogram classification performance and surpasses a state-of-the-art data augmentation technique called CutMix. This study also highlights that our transparency method is more effective than other augmentation strategies for BI-RADS classification and can be widely applied to other computer vision tasks.
Object classification in synthetic aperture sonar (SAS) imagery is usually a data starved and class imbalanced problem. There are few objects of interest present among much benign seafloor. Despite these problems, current classification techniques discard a large portion of the collected SAS information. In particular, a beamformed SAS image, which we call a single-look complex (SLC) image, contains complex pixels composed of real and imaginary parts. For human consumption, the SLC is converted to a magnitude-phase representation and the phase information is discarded. Even more problematic, the magnitude information usually exhibits a large dynamic range (>80dB) and must be dynamic range compressed for human display. Often it is this dynamic range compressed representation, originally designed for human consumption, which is fed into a classifier. Consequently, the classification process is completely void of the phase information. In this work, we show improvements in classification performance using the phase information from the SLC as well as information from an alternate source: photographs. We perform statistical testing to demonstrate the validity of our results.
Multiple instance learning (MIL) is a powerful tool to solve the weakly supervised classification in whole slide image (WSI) based pathology diagnosis. However, the current MIL methods are usually based on independent and identical distribution hypothesis, thus neglect the correlation among different instances. To address this problem, we proposed a new framework, called correlated MIL, and provided a proof for convergence. Based on this framework, we devised a Transformer based MIL (TransMIL), which explored both morphological and spatial information. The proposed TransMIL can effectively deal with unbalanced/balanced and binary/multiple classification with great visualization and interpretability. We conducted various experiments for three different computational pathology problems and achieved better performance and faster convergence compared with state-of-the-art methods. The test AUC for the binary tumor classification can be up to 93.09% over CAMELYON16 dataset. And the AUC over the cancer subtypes classification can be up to 96.03% and 98.82% over TCGA-NSCLC dataset and TCGA-RCC dataset, respectively. Implementation is available at: https://github.com/szc19990412/TransMIL.
With the development of deep learning, the performance of hyperspectral image (HSI) classification has been greatly improved in recent years. The shortage of training samples has become a bottleneck for further improvement of performance. In this paper, we propose a novel convolutional neural network framework for the characteristics of hyperspectral image data, called HSI-CNN. Firstly, the spectral-spatial feature is extracted from a target pixel and its neighbors. Then, a number of one-dimensional feature maps, obtained by convolution operation on spectral-spatial features, are stacked into a two-dimensional matrix. Finally, the two-dimensional matrix considered as an image is fed into standard CNN. This is why we call it HSI-CNN. In addition, we also implements two depth network classification models, called HSI-CNN+XGBoost and HSI-CapsNet, in order to compare the performance of our framework. Experiments show that the performance of hyperspectral image classification is improved efficiently with HSI-CNN framework. We evaluate the model's performance using four popular HSI datasets, which are the Kennedy Space Center (KSC), Indian Pines (IP), Pavia University scene (PU) and Salinas scene (SA). As far as we concerned, HSI-CNN has got the state-of-art accuracy among all methods we have known on these datasets of 99.28%, 99.09%, 99.42%, 98.95% separately.
Convolutional neural nets (CNN) are the leading computer vision method for classifying images. In some cases, it is desirable to classify only a specific region of the image that corresponds to a certain object. Hence, assuming that the region of the object in the image is known in advance and is given as a binary region of interest (ROI) mask, the goal is to classify the object in this region using a convolutional neural net. This goal is achieved using a standard image classification net with the addition of a side branch, which converts the ROI mask into an attention map. This map is then combined with the image classification net. This allows the net to focus the attention on the object region while still extracting contextual cues from the background. This approach was evaluated using the COCO object dataset and the OpenSurfaces materials dataset. In both cases, it gave superior results to methods that completely ignore the background region. In addition, it was found that combining the attention map at the first layer of the net gave better results than combining it at higher layers of the net. The advantages of this method are most apparent in the classification of small regions which demands a great deal of contextual information from the background.
We propose a strategy for land use classification which exploits Multiple Kernel Learning (MKL) to automatically determine a suitable combination of a set of features without requiring any heuristic knowledge about the classification task. We present a novel procedure that allows MKL to achieve good performance in the case of small training sets. Experimental results on publicly available datasets demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach.
Humans process visual scenes selectively and sequentially using attention. Central to models of human visual attention is the saliency map. We propose a hierarchical visual architecture that operates on a saliency map and uses a novel attention mechanism to sequentially focus on salient regions and take additional glimpses within those regions. The architecture is motivated by human visual attention, and is used for multi-label image classification on a novel multiset task, demonstrating that it achieves high precision and recall while localizing objects with its attention. Unlike conventional multi-label image classification models, the model supports multiset prediction due to a reinforcement-learning based training process that allows for arbitrary label permutation and multiple instances per label.
In recent years, privacy-preserving methods for deep learning have become an urgent problem. Accordingly, we propose the combined use of federated learning (FL) and encrypted images for privacy-preserving image classification under the use of the vision transformer (ViT). The proposed method allows us not only to train models over multiple participants without directly sharing their raw data but to also protect the privacy of test (query) images for the first time. In addition, it can also maintain the same accuracy as normally trained models. In an experiment, the proposed method was demonstrated to well work without any performance degradation on the CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 datasets.
Content Based Image Retrieval(CBIR) is one of the important subfield in the field of Information Retrieval. The goal of a CBIR algorithm is to retrieve semantically similar images in response to a query image submitted by the end user. CBIR is a hard problem because of the phenomenon known as $\textit {semantic gap}$. In this thesis, we aim at analyzing the performance of a CBIR system build using local feature vectors and Intermediate Matching Kernel. We also propose a Two-Step Matching process for reducing the response time of the CBIR systems. Further, we develop a Meta-Learning framework for improving the retrieval performance of these systems. Our results show that the Two-Step Matching process significantly reduces response time and the Meta-Learning Framework improves the retrieval performance by more than two fold. We also analyze the performance of various image classification systems that use different image representations constructed from the local feature vectors.
In this paper, we investigate the problem of learning disentangled representations. Given a pair of images sharing some attributes, we aim to create a low-dimensional representation which is split into two parts: a shared representation that captures the common information between the images and an exclusive representation that contains the specific information of each image. To address this issue, we propose a model based on mutual information estimation without relying on image reconstruction or image generation. Mutual information maximization is performed to capture the attributes of data in the shared and exclusive representations while we minimize the mutual information between the shared and exclusive representation to enforce representation disentanglement. We show that these representations are useful to perform downstream tasks such as image classification and image retrieval based on the shared or exclusive component. Moreover, classification results show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art model based on VAE/GAN approaches in representation disentanglement.
Nearest neighbors (NN) are traditionally used to compute final decisions, e.g., in Support Vector Machines or k-NN classifiers, and to provide users with explanations for the model's decision. In this paper, we show a novel utility of nearest neighbors: To improve predictions of a frozen, pretrained image classifier C. We leverage an image comparator S that (1) compares the input image with NN images from the top-K most probable classes given by C; and (2) uses scores from S to weight the confidence scores of C to refine predictions. Our method consistently improves fine-grained image classification accuracy on CUB-200, Cars-196, and Dogs-120. Also, a human study finds that showing users our probable-class nearest neighbors (PCNN) reduces over-reliance on AI, thus improving their decision accuracy over prior work which only shows only the most-probable (top-1) class examples.
A large-scale image-text pair dataset has greatly contributed to the development of vision-language pre-training (VLP) models, which enable zero-shot or few-shot classification without costly annotation. However, in the medical domain, the scarcity of data remains a significant challenge for developing a powerful VLP model. In this paper, we tackle the lack of image-text data in chest X-ray by expanding image-label pair as image-text pair via general prompt and utilizing multiple images and multiple sections in a radiologic report. We also design two contrastive losses, named ICL and TCL, for learning study-level characteristics of medical images and reports, respectively. Our model outperforms the state-of-the-art models trained under the same conditions. Also, enlarged dataset improve the discriminative power of our pre-trained model for classification, while sacrificing marginal retrieval performance. Code is available at https://github.com/kakaobrain/cxr-clip.
With such a massive growth in the number of images stored, efficient search in a database has become a crucial endeavor managed by image retrieval systems. Image Retrieval with Relevance Feedback (IRRF) involves iterative human interaction during the retrieval process, yielding more meaningful outcomes. This process can be generally cast as a binary classification problem with only {\it few} labeled samples derived from user feedback. The IRRF task frames a unique few-shot learning characteristics including binary classification of imbalanced and asymmetric classes, all in an open-set regime. In this paper, we study this task through the lens of few-shot learning methods. We propose a new scheme based on a hyper-network, that is tailored to the task and facilitates swift adjustment to user feedback. Our approach's efficacy is validated through comprehensive evaluations on multiple benchmarks and two supplementary tasks, supported by theoretical analysis. We demonstrate the advantage of our model over strong baselines on 4 different datasets in IRRF, addressing also retrieval of images with multiple objects. Furthermore, we show that our method can attain SoTA results in few-shot one-class classification and reach comparable results in binary classification task of few-shot open-set recognition.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has emerged as a valuable tool for assisting radiologists in breast cancer detection and diagnosis. However, the success of AI applications in this domain is restricted by the quantity and quality of available data, posing challenges due to limited and costly data annotation procedures that often lead to annotation shifts. This study simulates, analyses and mitigates annotation shifts in cancer classification in the breast mammography domain. First, a high-accuracy cancer risk prediction model is developed, which effectively distinguishes benign from malignant lesions. Next, model performance is used to quantify the impact of annotation shift. We uncover a substantial impact of annotation shift on multiclass classification performance particularly for malignant lesions. We thus propose a training data augmentation approach based on single-image generative models for the affected class, requiring as few as four in-domain annotations to considerably mitigate annotation shift, while also addressing dataset imbalance. Lastly, we further increase performance by proposing and validating an ensemble architecture based on multiple models trained under different data augmentation regimes. Our study offers key insights into annotation shift in deep learning breast cancer classification and explores the potential of single-image generative models to overcome domain shift challenges.
Deep learning has made significant improvements at many image processing tasks in recent years, such as image classification, object recognition and object detection. Convolutional neural networks (CNN), which is a popular deep learning architecture designed to process data in multiple array form, show great success to almost all detection \& recognition problems and computer vision tasks. However, the number of parameters in a CNN is too high such that the computers require more energy and larger memory size. In order to solve this problem, we propose a novel energy efficient model Binary Weight and Hadamard-transformed Image Network (BWHIN), which is a combination of Binary Weight Network (BWN) and Hadamard-transformed Image Network (HIN). It is observed that energy efficiency is achieved with a slight sacrifice at classification accuracy. Among all energy efficient networks, our novel ensemble model outperforms other energy efficient models.
Purpose: This study examines the core traits of image-to-image translation (I2I) networks, focusing on their effectiveness and adaptability in everyday clinical settings. Methods: We have analyzed data from 794 patients diagnosed with prostate cancer (PCa), using ten prominent 2D/3D I2I networks to convert ultrasound (US) images into MRI scans. We also introduced a new analysis of Radiomic features (RF) via the Spearman correlation coefficient to explore whether networks with high performance (SSIM>85%) could detect subtle RFs. Our study further examined synthetic images by 7 invited physicians. As a final evaluation study, we have investigated the improvement that are achieved using the synthetic MRI data on two traditional machine learning and one deep learning method. Results: In quantitative assessment, 2D-Pix2Pix network substantially outperformed the other 7 networks, with an average SSIM~0.855. The RF analysis revealed that 76 out of 186 RFs were identified using the 2D-Pix2Pix algorithm alone, although half of the RFs were lost during the translation process. A detailed qualitative review by 7 medical doctors noted a deficiency in low-level feature recognition in I2I tasks. Furthermore, the study found that synthesized image-based classification outperformed US image-based classification with an average accuracy and AUC~0.93. Conclusion: This study showed that while 2D-Pix2Pix outperformed cutting-edge networks in low-level feature discovery and overall error and similarity metrics, it still requires improvement in low-level feature performance, as highlighted by Group 3. Further, the study found using synthetic image-based classification outperformed original US image-based methods.
Existing image classification datasets used in computer vision tend to have a uniform distribution of images across object categories. In contrast, the natural world is heavily imbalanced, as some species are more abundant and easier to photograph than others. To encourage further progress in challenging real world conditions we present the iNaturalist species classification and detection dataset, consisting of 859,000 images from over 5,000 different species of plants and animals. It features visually similar species, captured in a wide variety of situations, from all over the world. Images were collected with different camera types, have varying image quality, feature a large class imbalance, and have been verified by multiple citizen scientists. We discuss the collection of the dataset and present extensive baseline experiments using state-of-the-art computer vision classification and detection models. Results show that current non-ensemble based methods achieve only 67% top one classification accuracy, illustrating the difficulty of the dataset. Specifically, we observe poor results for classes with small numbers of training examples suggesting more attention is needed in low-shot learning.
We recognize that the skin lesion diagnosis is an essential and challenging sub-task in Image classification, in which the Fisher vector (FV) encoding algorithm and deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) are two of the most successful techniques. Since the joint use of FV and DCNN has demonstrated proven success, the joint techniques could have discriminatory power on skin lesion diagnosis as well. To this hypothesis, we propose the aggregation algorithm for skin lesion diagnosis that utilize the residual network to extract the local features and the Fisher vector method to aggregate the local features to image-level representation. We applied our algorithm on the International Skin Imaging Collaboration 2018 (ISIC2018) challenge and only focus on the third task, i.e., the disease classification.
Classification systems typically act in isolation, meaning they are required to implicitly memorize the characteristics of all candidate classes in order to classify. The cost of this is increased memory usage and poor sample efficiency. We propose a model which instead verifies using reference images during the classification process, reducing the burden of memorization. The model uses iterative nondifferentiable queries in order to classify an image. We demonstrate that such a model is feasible to train and can match baseline accuracy while being more parameter efficient. However, we show that finding the correct balance between image recognition and verification is essential to pushing the model towards desired behavior, suggesting that a pipeline of recognition followed by verification is a more promising approach.