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.
Recently, deep learning enabled the accurate segmentation of various diseases in medical imaging. These performances, however, typically demand large amounts of manual voxel annotations. This tedious process for volumetric data becomes more complex when not all required information is available in a single imaging domain as is the case for PET/CT data. We propose a multimodal interactive segmentation framework that mitigates these issues by combining anatomical and physiological cues from PET/CT data. Our framework utilizes the geodesic distance transform to represent the user annotations and we implement a novel ellipsoid-based user simulation scheme during training. We further propose two annotation interfaces and conduct a user study to estimate their usability. We evaluated our model on the in-domain validation dataset and an unseen PET/CT dataset. We make our code publicly available: https://github.com/verena-hallitschke/pet-ct-annotate.
Radiance Fields (RF) are popular to represent casually-captured scenes for new view synthesis and several applications beyond it. Mixed reality on personal spaces needs understanding and manipulating scenes represented as RFs, with semantic segmentation of objects as an important step. Prior segmentation efforts show promise but don't scale to complex objects with diverse appearance. We present the ISRF method to interactively segment objects with fine structure and appearance. Nearest neighbor feature matching using distilled semantic features identifies high-confidence seed regions. Bilateral search in a joint spatio-semantic space grows the region to recover accurate segmentation. We show state-of-the-art results of segmenting objects from RFs and compositing them to another scene, changing appearance, etc., and an interactive segmentation tool that others can use. Project Page: https://rahul-goel.github.io/isrf/
The Me 163 was a Second World War fighter airplane and a result of the German air force secret developments. One of these airplanes is currently owned and displayed in the historic aircraft exhibition of the Deutsches Museum in Munich, Germany. To gain insights with respect to its history, design and state of preservation, a complete CT scan was obtained using an industrial XXL-computer tomography scanner. Using the CT data from the Me 163, all its details can visually be examined at various levels, ranging from the complete hull down to single sprockets and rivets. However, while a trained human observer can identify and interpret the volumetric data with all its parts and connections, a virtual dissection of the airplane and all its different parts would be quite desirable. Nevertheless, this means, that an instance segmentation of all components and objects of interest into disjoint entities from the CT data is necessary. As of currently, no adequate computer-assisted tools for automated or semi-automated segmentation of such XXL-airplane data are available, in a first step, an interactive data annotation and object labelling process has been established. So far, seven 512 x 512 x 512 voxel sub-volumes from the Me 163 airplane have been annotated and labelled, whose results can potentially be used for various new applications in the field of digital heritage, non-destructive testing, or machine-learning. This work describes the data acquisition process of the airplane using an industrial XXL-CT scanner, outlines the interactive segmentation and labelling scheme to annotate sub-volumes of the airplane's CT data, describes and discusses various challenges with respect to interpreting and handling the annotated and labelled data.
Click-based interactive image segmentation aims at extracting objects with a limited user clicking. A hierarchical backbone is the de-facto architecture for current methods. Recently, the plain, non-hierarchical Vision Transformer (ViT) has emerged as a competitive backbone for dense prediction tasks. This design allows the original ViT to be a foundation model that can be finetuned for downstream tasks without redesigning a hierarchical backbone for pretraining. Although this design is simple and has been proven effective, it has not yet been explored for interactive image segmentation. To fill this gap, we propose SimpleClick, the first interactive segmentation method that leverages a plain backbone. Based on the plain backbone, we introduce a symmetric patch embedding layer that encodes clicks into the backbone with minor modifications to the backbone itself. With the plain backbone pretrained as a masked autoencoder (MAE), SimpleClick achieves state-of-the-art performance. Remarkably, our method achieves 4.15 NoC@90 on SBD, improving 21.8% over the previous best result. Extensive evaluation on medical images demonstrates the generalizability of our method. We further develop an extremely tiny ViT backbone for SimpleClick and provide a detailed computational analysis, highlighting its suitability as a practical annotation tool.
Interactive image segmentation aims at segmenting a target region through a way of human-computer interaction. Recent works based on deep learning have achieved excellent performance, while most of them focus on improving the accuracy of the training set and ignore potential improvement on the test set. In the inference phase, they tend to have a good performance on similar domains to the training set, and lack adaptability to domain shift, so they require more user efforts to obtain satisfactory results. In this work, we propose RAIS, a robust and accurate architecture for interactive segmentation with continuous learning, where the model can learn from both train and test data sets. For efficient learning on the test set, we propose a novel optimization strategy to update global and local parameters with a basic segmentation module and adaptation module, respectively. Moreover, we perform extensive experiments on several benchmarks that show our method can handle data distribution shifts and achieves SOTA performance compared with recent interactive segmentation methods. Besides, our method also shows its robustness in the datasets of remote sensing and medical imaging where the data domains are completely different between training and testing.
In recent years, the rapid development of deep learning has brought great advancements to image and video segmentation methods based on neural networks. However, to unleash the full potential of such models, large numbers of high-quality annotated images are necessary for model training. Currently, many widely used open-source image segmentation software relies heavily on manual annotation which is tedious and time-consuming. In this work, we introduce EISeg, an Efficient Interactive SEGmentation annotation tool that can drastically improve image segmentation annotation efficiency, generating highly accurate segmentation masks with only a few clicks. We also provide various domain-specific models for remote sensing, medical imaging, industrial quality inspections, human segmentation, and temporal aware models for video segmentation. The source code for our algorithm and user interface are available at: https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleSeg.
The goal of this paper is to interactively refine the automatic segmentation on challenging structures that fall behind human performance, either due to the scarcity of available annotations or the difficulty nature of the problem itself, for example, on segmenting cancer or small organs. Specifically, we propose a novel Transformer-based architecture for Interactive Segmentation (TIS), that treats the refinement task as a procedure for grouping pixels with similar features to those clicks given by the end users. Our proposed architecture is composed of Transformer Decoder variants, which naturally fulfills feature comparison with the attention mechanisms. In contrast to existing approaches, our proposed TIS is not limited to binary segmentations, and allows the user to edit masks for arbitrary number of categories. To validate the proposed approach, we conduct extensive experiments on three challenging datasets and demonstrate superior performance over the existing state-of-the-art methods. The project page is: https://wtliu7.github.io/tis/.
The FastGeodis package provides an efficient implementation for computing Geodesic and Euclidean distance transforms (or a mixture of both), targeting efficient utilisation of CPU and GPU hardware. In particular, it implements the paralellisable raster scan method from Criminisi et al. (2009), where elements in a row (2D) or plane (3D) can be computed with parallel threads. This package is able to handle 2D as well as 3D data, where it achieves up to a 20x speedup on a CPU and up to a 74x speedup on a GPU as compared to an existing open-source library (Wang, 2020) that uses a non-parallelisable single-thread CPU implementation. The performance speedups reported here were evaluated using 3D volume data on an Nvidia GeForce Titan X (12 GB) with a 6-Core Intel Xeon E5-1650 CPU. Further in-depth comparison of performance improvements are discussed in the FastGeodis documentation: https://fastgeodis.readthedocs.io
Instance segmentation with unseen objects is a challenging problem in unstructured environments. To solve this problem, we propose a robot learning approach to actively interact with novel objects and collect each object's training label for further fine-tuning to improve the segmentation model performance, while avoiding the time-consuming process of manually labeling a dataset. The Singulation-and-Grasping (SaG) policy is trained through end-to-end reinforcement learning. Given a cluttered pile of objects, our approach chooses pushing and grasping motions to break the clutter and conducts object-agnostic grasping for which the SaG policy takes as input the visual observations and imperfect segmentation. We decompose the problem into three subtasks: (1) the object singulation subtask aims to separate the objects from each other, which creates more space that alleviates the difficulty of (2) the collision-free grasping subtask; (3) the mask generation subtask to obtain the self-labeled ground truth masks by using an optical flow-based binary classifier and motion cue post-processing for transfer learning. Our system achieves 70% singulation success rate in simulated cluttered scenes. The interactive segmentation of our system achieves 87.8%, 73.9%, and 69.3% average precision for toy blocks, YCB objects in simulation and real-world novel objects, respectively, which outperforms several baselines.
We introduce an interactive image segmentation and visualization framework for identifying, inspecting, and editing tiny objects (just a few pixels wide) in large multi-megapixel high-dynamic-range (HDR) images. Detecting cosmic rays (CRs) in astronomical observations is a cumbersome workflow that requires multiple tools, so we developed an interactive toolkit that unifies model inference, HDR image visualization, segmentation mask inspection and editing into a single graphical user interface. The feature set, initially designed for astronomical data, makes this work a useful research-supporting tool for human-in-the-loop tiny-object segmentation in scientific areas like biomedicine, materials science, remote sensing, etc., as well as computer vision. Our interface features mouse-controlled, synchronized, dual-window visualization of the image and the segmentation mask, a critical feature for locating tiny objects in multi-megapixel images. The browser-based tool can be readily hosted on the web to provide multi-user access and GPU acceleration for any device. The toolkit can also be used as a high-precision annotation tool, or adapted as the frontend for an interactive machine learning framework. Our open-source dataset, CR detection model, and visualization toolkit are available at https://github.com/cy-xu/cosmic-conn.
We propose an interactive approach for 3D instance segmentation, where users can iteratively collaborate with a deep learning model to segment objects in a 3D point cloud directly. Current methods for 3D instance segmentation are generally trained in a fully-supervised fashion, which requires large amounts of costly training labels, and does not generalize well to classes unseen during training. Few works have attempted to obtain 3D segmentation masks using human interactions. Existing methods rely on user feedback in the 2D image domain. As a consequence, users are required to constantly switch between 2D images and 3D representations, and custom architectures are employed to combine multiple input modalities. Therefore, integration with existing standard 3D models is not straightforward. The core idea of this work is to enable users to interact directly with 3D point clouds by clicking on desired 3D objects of interest~(or their background) to interactively segment the scene in an open-world setting. Specifically, our method does not require training data from any target domain, and can adapt to new environments where no appropriate training sets are available. Our system continuously adjusts the object segmentation based on the user feedback and achieves accurate dense 3D segmentation masks with minimal human effort (few clicks per object). Besides its potential for efficient labeling of large-scale and varied 3D datasets, our approach, where the user directly interacts with the 3D environment, enables new applications in AR/VR and human-robot interaction.
Interactive segmentation allows users to extract target masks by making positive/negative clicks. Although explored by many previous works, there is still a gap between academic approaches and industrial needs: first, existing models are not efficient enough to work on low power devices; second, they perform poorly when used to refine preexisting masks as they could not avoid destroying the correct part. FocalClick solves both issues at once by predicting and updating the mask in localized areas. For higher efficiency, we decompose the slow prediction on the entire image into two fast inferences on small crops: a coarse segmentation on the Target Crop, and a local refinement on the Focus Crop. To make the model work with preexisting masks, we formulate a sub-task termed Interactive Mask Correction, and propose Progressive Merge as the solution. Progressive Merge exploits morphological information to decide where to preserve and where to update, enabling users to refine any preexisting mask effectively. FocalClick achieves competitive results against SOTA methods with significantly smaller FLOPs. It also shows significant superiority when making corrections on preexisting masks. Code and data will be released at github.com/XavierCHEN34/ClickSEG
We aim to tackle the problem of point-based interactive segmentation, in which the key challenge is to propagate the user-provided annotations to unlabeled regions efficiently. Existing methods tackle this challenge by utilizing computationally expensive fully connected graphs or transformer architectures that sacrifice important fine-grained information required for accurate segmentation. To overcome these limitations, we propose a cascade sparse feature propagation network that learns a click-augmented feature representation for propagating user-provided information to unlabeled regions. The sparse design of our network enables efficient information propagation on high-resolution features, resulting in more detailed object segmentation. We validate the effectiveness of our method through comprehensive experiments on various benchmarks, and the results demonstrate the superior performance of our approach. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/kleinzcy/CSFPN}{https://github.com/kleinzcy/CSFPN}.
Automatic segmentation of lung lesions associated with COVID-19 in CT images requires large amount of annotated volumes. Annotations mandate expert knowledge and are time-intensive to obtain through fully manual segmentation methods. Additionally, lung lesions have large inter-patient variations, with some pathologies having similar visual appearance as healthy lung tissues. This poses a challenge when applying existing semi-automatic interactive segmentation techniques for data labelling. To address these challenges, we propose an efficient convolutional neural networks (CNNs) that can be learned online while the annotator provides scribble-based interaction. To accelerate learning from only the samples labelled through user-interactions, a patch-based approach is used for training the network. Moreover, we use weighted cross-entropy loss to address the class imbalance that may result from user-interactions. During online inference, the learned network is applied to the whole input volume using a fully convolutional approach. We compare our proposed method with state-of-the-art using synthetic scribbles and show that it outperforms existing methods on the task of annotating lung lesions associated with COVID-19, achieving 16% higher Dice score while reducing execution time by 3$\times$ and requiring 9000 lesser scribbles-based labelled voxels. Due to the online learning aspect, our approach adapts quickly to user input, resulting in high quality segmentation labels. Source code for ECONet is available at: https://github.com/masadcv/ECONet-MONAILabel.
Recently, several image segmentation methods that welcome and leverage different types of user assistance have been developed. In these methods, the user inputs can be provided by drawing bounding boxes over image objects, drawing scribbles or planting seeds that help to differentiate between image boundaries or by interactively refining the missegmented image regions. Due to the variety in the types and the amounts of these inputs, relative assessment of different segmentation methods becomes difficult. As a possible solution, we propose a simple yet effective, statistical segmentation method that can handle and utilize different input types and amounts. The proposed method is based on robust hypothesis testing, specifically the DGL test, and can be implemented with time complexity that is linear in the number of pixels and quadratic in the number of image regions. Therefore, it is suitable to be used as a baseline method for quick benchmarking and assessing the relative performance improvements of different types of user-assisted segmentation algorithms. We provide a mathematical analysis on the operation of the proposed method, discuss its capabilities and limitations, provide design guidelines and present simulations that validate its operation.
We propose iSegFormer, a memory-efficient transformer that combines a Swin transformer with a lightweight multilayer perceptron (MLP) decoder. With the efficient Swin transformer blocks for hierarchical self-attention and the simple MLP decoder for aggregating both local and global attention, iSegFormer learns powerful representations while achieving high computational efficiencies. Specifically, we apply iSegFormer to interactive 3D medical image segmentation.
Interactive segmentation has recently attracted attention for specialized tasks where expert input is required to further enhance the segmentation performance. In this work, we propose a novel interactive segmentation framework, where user clicks are dynamically adapted in size based on the current segmentation mask. The clicked regions form a weight map and are fed to a deep neural network as a novel weighted loss function. To evaluate our loss function, an interactive U-Net (IU-Net) model which applies both foreground and background user clicks as the main method of interaction is employed. We train and validate on the BCV dataset, while testing on spleen and colon cancer CT images from the MSD dataset to improve the overall segmentation accuracy in comparison to the standard U-Net using our weighted loss function. Applying dynamic user click sizes increases the overall accuracy by 5.60% and 10.39% respectively by utilizing only a single user interaction.
Medical image segmentation is one of the fundamental problems for artificial intelligence-based clinical decision systems. Current automatic medical image segmentation methods are often failed to meet clinical requirements. As such, a series of interactive segmentation algorithms are proposed to utilize expert correction information. However, existing methods suffer from some segmentation refining failure problems after long-term interactions and some cost problems from expert annotation, which hinder clinical applications. This paper proposes an interactive segmentation framework, called interactive MEdical segmentation with self-adaptive Confidence CAlibration (MECCA), by introducing the corrective action evaluation, which combines the action-based confidence learning and multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). The evaluation is established through a novel action-based confidence network, and the corrective actions are obtained from MARL. Based on the confidential information, a self-adaptive reward function is designed to provide more detailed feedback, and a simulated label generation mechanism is proposed on unsupervised data to reduce over-reliance on labeled data. Experimental results on various medical image datasets have shown the significant performance of the proposed algorithm.
Automatic medical image segmentation via convolutional neural networks (CNNs) has shown promising results. However, they may not always be robust enough for clinical use. Sub-optimal segmentation would require clinician's to manually delineate the target object, causing frustration. To address this problem, a novel interactive CNN-based segmentation framework is proposed in this work. The aim is to represent the CNN segmentation contour as B-splines by utilising B-spline explicit active surfaces (BEAS). The interactive element of the framework allows the user to precisely edit the contour in real-time, and by utilising BEAS it ensures the final contour is smooth and anatomically plausible. This framework was applied to the task of 2D segmentation of the levator hiatus from 2D ultrasound (US) images, and compared to the current clinical tools used in pelvic floor disorder clinic (4DView, GE Healthcare; Zipf, Austria). Experimental results show that: 1) the proposed framework is more robust than current state-of-the-art CNNs; 2) the perceived workload calculated via the NASA-TLX index was reduced more than half for the proposed approach in comparison to current clinical tools; and 3) the proposed tool requires at least 13 seconds less user time than the clinical tools, which was significant (p=0.001).