Image Segmentation

Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling (ASPP) is a semantic segmentation module for resampling a given feature layer at multiple rates prior to convolution. This amounts to probing the original image with multiple filters that have complementary effective fields of view, thus capturing objects as well as useful image context at multiple scales. Rather than actually resampling features, the mapping is implemented using multiple parallel atrous convolutional layers with different sampling rates.

SegNet is a semantic segmentation model. This core trainable segmentation architecture consists of an encoder network, a corresponding decoder network followed by a pixel-wise classification layer. The architecture of the encoder network is topologically identical to the 13 convolutional layers in the VGG16 network. The role of the decoder network is to map the low resolution encoder feature maps to full input resolution feature maps for pixel-wise classification. The novelty of SegNet lies is in the manner in which the decoder upsamples its lower resolution input feature maps. Specifically, the decoder uses pooling indices computed in the max-pooling step of the corresponding encoder to perform non-linear upsampling.

UNet++ is an architecture for semantic segmentation based on the U-Net. Through the use of densely connected nested decoder sub-networks, it enhances extracted feature processing and was reported by its authors to outperform the U-Net in Electron Microscopy (EM), Cell, Nuclei, Brain Tumor, Liver and Lung Nodule medical image segmentation tasks.

UNETR, or UNet Transformer, is a Transformer-based architecture for medical image segmentation that utilizes a pure transformer as the encoder to learn sequence representations of the input volume -- effectively capturing the global multi-scale information. The transformer encoder is directly connected to a decoder via skip connections at different resolutions like a U-Net to compute the final semantic segmentation output.

The method exploits the finding that high correlation of segmentation performance among each U-Net's decoder layer -- with discriminative layer attached -- tends to have higher segmentation performance in the final segmentation map. By introducing an "Inter-layer Divergence Loss", based on Kulback-Liebler Divergence, to promotes the consistency between each discriminative output from decoder layers by minimizing the divergence. If we assume that each decoder layer is equivalent to PDE function parameterized by weight parameter $\theta$: $Decoder_i(x;\theta_i) \equiv PDE(x;\theta_i)$ Then our objective is trying to make each discriminative output similar to each other: $PDE(x; \theta_d) \sim PDE(x; \theta_i);\text{ } 0 \leq i < d$ Hence the objective is to $\text{minimize} \sum_{i=0}^{d} D_{KL}(\hat{y} || Decoder_i)$.

K-Net is a framework for unified semantic and instance segmentation that segments both instances and semantic categories consistently by a group of learnable kernels, where each kernel is responsible for generating a mask for either a potential instance or a stuff class. It begins with a set of kernels that are randomly initialized, and learns the kernels in accordance to the segmentation targets at hand, namely, semantic kernels for semantic categories and instance kernels for instance identities. A simple combination of semantic kernels and instance kernels allows panoptic segmentation naturally. In the forward pass, the kernels perform convolution on the image features to obtain the corresponding segmentation predictions. K-Net is formulated so that it dynamically updates the kernels to make them conditional to their activations on the image. Such a content-aware mechanism is crucial to ensure that each kernel, especially an instance kernel, responds accurately to varying objects in an image. Through applying this adaptive kernel update strategy iteratively, K-Net significantly improves the discriminative ability of the kernels and boosts the final segmentation performance. It is noteworthy that this strategy universally applies to kernels for all the segmentation tasks. It also utilises a bipartite matching strategy to assign learning targets for each kernel. This training approach is advantageous to conventional training strategies as it builds a one-to-one mapping between kernels and instances in an image. It thus resolves the problem of dealing with a varying number of instances in an image. In addition, it is purely mask-driven without involving boxes. Hence, K-Net is naturally NMS-free and box-free, which is appealing to real-time applications.

Channel-wise Cross Attention is a module for semantic segmentation used in the UCTransNet architecture. It is used to fuse features of inconsistent semantics between the Channel Transformer and U-Net decoder. It guides the channel and information filtration of the Transformer features and eliminates the ambiguity with the decoder features. Mathematically, we take the $i$-th level Transformer output $\mathbf{O\_{i}} \in \mathbb{R}^{C×H×W}$ and i-th level decoder feature map $\mathbf{D\_{i}} \in \mathbb{R}^{C×H×W}$ as the inputs of Channel-wise Cross Attention. Spatial squeeze is performed by a global average pooling (GAP) layer, producing vector $\mathcal{G}\left(\mathbf{X}\right) \in \mathbb{R}^{C×1×1}$ with its $k$th channel $\mathcal{G}\left(\mathbf{X}\right) = \frac{1}{H×W}\sum^{H}\_{i=1}\sum^{W}\_{j=1}\mathbf{X}^{k}\left(i, j\right)$. We use this operation to embed the global spatial information and then generate the attention mask: $$ \mathbf{M}\_{i} = \mathbf{L}\_{1} \cdot \mathcal{G}\left(\mathbf{O\_{i}}\right) + \mathbf{L}\_{2} \cdot \mathcal{G}\left(\mathbf{D}\_{i}\right) $$ where $\mathbf{L}\_{1} \in \mathbb{R}^{C×C}$ and $\mathbf{L}\_{2} \in \mathbb{R}^{C×C}$ and being weights of two Linear layers and the ReLU operator $\delta\left(\cdot\right)$. This operation in the equation above encodes the channel-wise dependencies. Following ECA-Net which empirically showed avoiding dimensionality reduction is important for learning channel attention, the authors use a single Linear layer and sigmoid function to build the channel attention map. The resultant vector is used to recalibrate or excite $\mathbf{O\_{i}}$ to $\mathbf{\bar{O}\_{i}} = \sigma\left(\mathbf{M\_{i}}\right) \cdot \mathbf{O\_{i}}$, where the activation $\sigma\left(\mathbf{M\_{i}}\right)$ indicates the importance of each channel. Finally, the masked $\mathbf{\bar{O}}\_{i}$ is concatenated with the up-sampled features of the $i$-th level decoder.

Recently, dense connections have attracted substantial attention in computer vision because they facilitate gradient flow and implicit deep supervision during training. Particularly, DenseNet that connects each layer to every other layer in a feed-forward fashion and has shown impressive performances in natural image classification tasks. We propose HyperDenseNet, a 3-D fully convolutional neural network that extends the definition of dense connectivity to multi-modal segmentation problems. Each imaging modality has a path, and dense connections occur not only between the pairs of layers within the same path but also between those across different paths. This contrasts with the existing multi-modal CNN approaches, in which modeling several modalities relies entirely on a single joint layer (or level of abstraction) for fusion, typically either at the input or at the output of the network. Therefore, the proposed network has total freedom to learn more complex combinations between the modalities, within and in-between all the levels of abstraction, which increases significantly the learning representation. We report extensive evaluations over two different and highly competitive multi-modal brain tissue segmentation challenges, iSEG 2017 and MRBrainS 2013, with the former focusing on six month infant data and the latter on adult images. HyperDenseNet yielded significant improvements over many state-of-the-art segmentation networks, ranking at the top on both benchmarks. We further provide a comprehensive experimental analysis of features re-use, which confirms the importance of hyper-dense connections in multi-modal representation learning.

BASNet, or Boundary-Aware Segmentation Network, is an image segmentation architecture that consists of a predict-refine architecture and a hybrid loss. The proposed BASNet comprises a predict-refine architecture and a hybrid loss, for highly accurate image segmentation. The predict-refine architecture consists of a densely supervised encoder-decoder network and a residual refinement module, which are respectively used to predict and refine a segmentation probability map. The hybrid loss is a combination of the binary cross entropy, structural similarity and intersection-over-union losses, which guide the network to learn three-level (i.e., pixel-, patch- and map- level) hierarchy representations.

CRF-RNN is a formulation of a CRF as a Recurrent Neural Network. Specifically it formulates mean-field approximate inference for the Conditional Random Fields with Gaussian pairwise potentials as Recurrent Neural Networks.

DeepLabv2 is an architecture for semantic segmentation that build on DeepLab with an atrous spatial pyramid pooling scheme. Here we have parallel dilated convolutions with different rates applied in the input feature map, which are then fused together. As objects of the same class can have different sizes in the image, ASPP helps to account for different object sizes.

STDC, or Short-Term Dense Concatenate, is a module for semantic segmentation to extract deep features with scalable receptive field and multi-scale information. It aims to remove structure redundancy in the BiSeNet architecture, specifically BiSeNet adds an extra path to encode spatial information which can be time-consuming,. Instead, STDC gradually reduces the dimension of feature maps and use the aggregation of them for image representation. We concatenate response maps from multiple continuous layers, each of which encodes input image/feature in different scales and respective fields, leading to multi-scale feature representation. To speed up, the filter size of layers is gradually reduced with negligible loss in segmentation performance.

Online Normalization is a normalization technique for training deep neural networks. To define Online Normalization. we replace arithmetic averages over the full dataset in with exponentially decaying averages of online samples. The decay factors $\alpha\_{f}$ and $\alpha\_{b}$ for forward and backward passes respectively are hyperparameters for the technique. We allow incoming samples $x\_{t}$, such as images, to have multiple scalar components and denote feature-wide mean and variance by $\mu\left(x\_{t}\right)$ and $\sigma^{2}\left(x\_{t}\right)$. The algorithm also applies to outputs of fully connected layers with only one scalar output per feature. In fact, this case simplifies to $\mu\left(x\_{t}\right) = x\_{t}$ and $\sigma\left(x\_{t}\right) = 0$. Denote scalars $\mu\_{t}$ and $\sigma\_{t}$ to denote running estimates of mean and variance across all samples. The subscript $t$ denotes time steps corresponding to processing new incoming samples. Online Normalization uses an ongoing process during the forward pass to estimate activation means and variances. It implements the standard online computation of mean and variance generalized to processing multi-value samples and exponential averaging of sample statistics. The resulting estimates directly lead to an affine normalization transform. $$ y\_{t} = \frac{x\_{t} - \mu\_{t-1}}{\sigma\_{t-1}} $$ $$ \mu\_{t} = \alpha\_{f}\mu\_{t-1} + \left(1-\alpha\_{f}\right)\mu\left(x\_{t}\right) $$ $$ \sigma^{2}\_{t} = \alpha\_{f}\sigma^{2}\_{t-1} + \left(1-\alpha\_{f}\right)\sigma^{2}\left(x\_{t}\right) + \alpha\_{f}\left(1-\alpha\_{f}\right)\left(\mu\left(x\_{t}\right) - \mu\_{t-1}\right)^{2} $$

Atrous Convolution Neural Network (ACNN), as a pooling-free network structure, is proposed to achieve full-resolution feature processing using a theoretically optimal dilation setting for a larger receptive field, even with fewer parameters. Compared to other techniques, it can achieve higher segmentation Intersection over Union (IoU) and much less trainable parameters and model sizes, indicating the benefit of full-resolution feature maps in feature processing.

Synergistic Image and Feature Alignment is an unsupervised domain adaptation framework that conducts synergistic alignment of domains from both image and feature perspectives. In SIFA, we simultaneously transform the appearance of images across domains and enhance domain-invariance of the extracted features by leveraging adversarial learning in multiple aspects and with a deeply supervised mechanism. The feature encoder is shared between both adaptive perspectives to leverage their mutual benefits via end-to-end learning.

DASPP is a deeper version of the ASPP module (the latter from DeepLabv3) that adds standard 3 × 3 convolution after 3 × 3 dilated convolutions to refine the features and also fusing the input and the output of the DASPP module via short residual connection. Also, the number of convolution filters of ASPP is reduced from 255 to 96 to gain computational performance.

HS-ResNet is a convolutional neural network that employs Hierarchical-Split Block as its central building block within a ResNet-like architecture.

Hierarchical-Split Block is a representational block for multi-scale feature representations. It contains many hierarchical split and concatenate connections within one single residual block. Specifically, ordinary feature maps in deep neural networks are split into $s$ groups, each with $w$ channels. As shown in the Figure, only the first group of filters can be straightly connected to next layer. The second group of feature maps are sent to a convolution of $3 \times 3$ filters to extract features firstly, then the output feature maps are split into two sub-groups in the channel dimension. One sub-group of feature maps straightly connected to next layer, while the other sub-group is concatenated with the next group of input feature maps in the channel dimension. The concatenated feature maps are operated by a set of $3 \times 3$ convolutional filters. This process repeats several times until the rest of input feature maps are processed. Finally, features maps from all input groups are concatenated and sent to another layer of $1 \times 1$ filters to rebuild the features.

LiteSeg is a lightweight architecture for semantic segmentation that uses a deeper version of Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling module (ASPP) and applies short and long residual connections, and depthwise separable convolution, resulting in a faster, more efficient model.

\begin{equation} QA\left( x \right) = \sigma\left( f\left( x \right)^{1x1} \right) + x \end{equation} Quick Attention takes in the feature map as an input WxHxC (Width x Height x Channels) and creates two instances of the input feature map then it performs the 1x1xC convolution on the first instance and calculates the sigmoid activations after that it is added with the second instance to generate the final attention map as output which is of same dimensions as of input.

Spatial CNN with UNet based Encoder-decoder and ConvLSTM