Boundary-aware Instance Segmentation

We address the problem of instance-level semantic segmentation, which aims at jointly detecting, segmenting and classifying every individual object in an image. In this context, existing methods typically propose candidate objects, usually as bounding boxes, and directly predict a binary mask within each such proposal. As a consequence, they cannot recover from errors in the object candidate generation process, such as too small or shifted boxes. In this paper, we introduce a novel object segment representation based on the distance transform of the object masks. We then design an object mask network (OMN) with a new residual-deconvolution architecture that infers such a representation and decodes it into the final binary object mask. This allows us to predict masks that go beyond the scope of the bounding boxes and are thus robust to inaccurate object candidates. We integrate our OMN into a Multitask Network Cascade framework, and learn the resulting boundary-aware instance segmentation (BAIS) network in an end-to-end manner. Our experiments on the PASCAL VOC 2012 and the Cityscapes datasets demonstrate the benefits of our approach, which outperforms the state-of- the-art in both object proposal generation and instance segmentation.

Multi-scale sequential network for semantic text segmentation and localization

Olivier Canévet, Jean-Marc Odobez

We present a novel method for semantic text document analysis which in addition to localizing text it labels the text in user-defined semantic categories. More precisely, it consists of a fully-convolutional and sequential network that we apply to the particular case of slide analysis to detect title, bullets and standard text. Our contributions are twofold: (1) A multi-scale network consisting of a series of stages that sequentially refine the prediction of text and semantic labels (text, title, bullet); (2) A synthetic database of slide images with text and semantic annotation that is used to train the network with abundant data and wide variability in text appearance, slide layouts, and noise such as compression artifacts. We evaluate our method on a collection of real slide images collected from multiple conferences, and show that it is able to localize text with an accuracy of 95%, and to classify titles and bullets with accuracies of 94% and 85% respectively. In addition, we show that our method is competitive on scene and born-digital image datasets, such as ICDAR 2011, where it achieves an accuracy of 91.1%.

2020

Learning Approach to Delineation of Curvilinear Structures in 2D and 3D Images

Agata Justyna Mosinska

Detection of curvilinear structures has long been of interest due to its wide range of applications. Large amounts of imaging data could be readily used in many fields, but it is practically not possible to analyze them manually. Hence, the need for automated delineation approaches. In the recent years Computer Vision witnessed a paradigm shift from mathematical modelling to data-driven methods based on Machine Learning. This led to improvements in performance and robustness of the detection algorithms. Nonetheless, most Machine Learning methods are general-purpose and they do not exploit the specificity of the delineation problem. In this thesis, we present learning methods suited for this task and we apply them to various kinds of microscopic and natural images, proving the general applicability of the presented solutions. First, we introduce a topology loss - a new training loss term, which captures higher-level features of curvilinear networks such as smoothness, connectivity and continuity. This is in contrast to most Deep Learning segmentation methods that do not take into account the geometry of the resulting prediction. In order to compute the new loss term, we extract topology features of prediction and ground-truth using a pre-trained network, whose filters are activated by structures at different scales and orientations. We show that this approach yields better results in terms of conventional segmentation metrics and overall topology of the resulting delineation. Although segmentation of curvilinear structures provides useful information, it is not always sufficient. In many cases, such as neuroscience and cartography, it is crucial to estimate the network connectivity. In order to find the graph representation of the structure depicted in the image, we propose an approach for joint segmentation and connection classification. Apart from pixel probabilities, this approach also returns the likelihood of a proposed path being a part of the reconstructed network. We show that segmentation and path classification are closely related tasks and can benefit from the synergy. The aforementioned methods rely on Machine Learning, which requires significant amounts of annotated ground-truth data to train models. The labelling process often requires expertise, it is costly and tiresome. To alleviate this problem, we introduce an Active Learning method that significantly decreases the time spent on annotating images. It queries the annotator only about the most informative examples, in this case the hypothetical paths belonging to the structure of interest. Contrary to conventional Active Learning methods, our approach exploits local consistency of linear paths to pick the ones that stand out from their neighborhood. Our final contribution is a method suited for both Active Learning and proofreading the result, which often requires more time than the automated delineation itself. It investigates edges of the delineation graph and determines the ones that are especially significant for the global reconstruction by perturbing their weights. Our Active Learning and proofreading strategies are combined with a new efficient formulation of an optimal subgraph computation and reduce the annotation effort by up to 80%.

EPFL2019

A Stepwise Domain Adaptive Segmentation Network With Covariate Shift Alleviation for Remote Sensing Imagery

Yinlin Hu, Yunpeng Li, Rui Song

Semantic segmentation for remote sensing images (RSI) is critical for the Earth monitoring system. However, the covariate shift between RSI datasets under different capture conditions cannot be alleviated by directly using the unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) method, which negatively affects the segmentation accuracy in RSI. We propose a stepwise domain adaptive segmentation network with covariate shift alleviation (Cov-DA) for RSI parsing to solve this issue. Specifically, to alleviate domain shift generated by different sensors, both the source and target domains are projected into a colorspace with normalized distribution through an elaborate colorspace mapping unified module (CMUM). The color distributions of these two domains tend to be more uniform. Furthermore, in the target domain, the multistatistics joint evaluation module (MJEM) is proposed to capture different statistical characteristics of subscenarios for selecting plain scenarios regarded as high-confidence segmentation results to assist the further improvement of segmentation performance. In addition, a pyramid perceptual attention module (PPAM) containing omnidirectional features without computational burdens is added to our network for effectively enhancing the multiscale feature capture ability. In the cross-city DA experiments based on the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS) and aerial benchmarks, the superiority of our algorithm is significantly demonstrated. Furthermore, we release a large-scale Martian terrain dataset noted as "Mars-Seg" containing 5 K images with pixel-level accurate annotations regarding issues, such as the lack of semantic segmentation datasets for unknown scenes.

IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC2022

Learning Approach to Delineation of Curvilinear Structures in 2D and 3D Images

Agata Justyna Mosinska

EPFL2019