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1. Instance Segmentation of Neural Cells

   Yi, J. ; Wu, P. ; Jiang, M. ; Hoeppner, D. J. ; Metaxas, D. ( September 2018 , ECCV 2018 workshop)

   Instance segmentation of neural cells plays an important role in brain study. However, this task is challenging due to the special shapes and behaviors of neural cells. Existing methods are not precise enough to capture their tiny structures, e.g., filopodia and lamellipodia, which are critical to the understanding of cell interaction and behavior. To this end, we propose a novel deep multi-task learning model to jointly detect and segment neural cells instance-wise. Our method is built upon SSD, with ResNet101 as the backbone to achieve both high detection accuracy and fast speed. Furthermore, unlike existing works which tend to producemore »wavy and inaccurate boundaries, we embed a deconvolution module into SSD to better capture details. Experiments on a dataset of neural cell microscopic images show that our method is able to achieve better per- formance in terms of accuracy and efficiency, comparing favorably with current state-of-the-art methods.« less
2. PIXEL-WISE NEURAL CELL INSTANCE SEGMENTATION

   Yi, J. ; Wu, P. ; Hoeppner, D. J. ; Metaxas, D. ( April 2018 , 2018 IEEE 15th International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI 2018))

   Accurate cell instance segmentation plays an important role in the study of neural cell interactions, which are critical for understanding the development of brain. These interactions are performed through the filopodia and lamellipodia of neural cells, which are extremely tiny structures and as a result render most existing instance segmentation methods powerless to precisely capture them. To solve this issue, in this paper we present a novel hierarchical neural network comprising object detection and segmentation modules. Compared to previous work, our model is able to efficiently share and make full use of the information at different levels between the twomore »modules. Our method is simple yet powerful, and experimental results show that it captures the contours of neural cells, especially the filopodia and lamellipodia, with high accuracy, and outperforms recent state of the art by a large margin.« less
3. Attentive Normalization

   https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58520-4_5  

   Li, X. ; Sun, W. ; Wu, T. ( August 2020 , 16th European Conference on Computer Vision (2020))

   Vedaldi, A. (Ed.)

   In state-of-the-art deep neural networks, both feature normalization and feature attention have become ubiquitous. They are usually studied as separate modules, however. In this paper, we propose a light-weight integration between the two schema and present Attentive Normalization (AN). Instead of learning a single affine transformation, AN learns a mixture of affine transformations and utilizes their weighted-sum as the final affine transformation applied to re-calibrate features in an instance-specific way. The weights are learned by leveraging channel-wise feature attention. In experiments, we test the proposed AN using four representative neural architectures. In the ImageNet-1000 classification benchmark and the MS-COCO 2017more »object detection and instance segmentation benchmark. AN obtains consistent performance improvement for different neural architectures in both benchmarks with absolute increase of top-1 accuracy in ImageNet-1000 between 0.5\% and 2.7\%, and absolute increase up to 1.8\% and 2.2\% for bounding box and mask AP in MS-COCO respectively. We observe that the proposed AN provides a strong alternative to the widely used Squeeze-and-Excitation (SE) module. The source codes are publicly available at \href{https://github.com/iVMCL/AOGNet-v2}{the ImageNet Classification Repo} and \href{https://github.com/iVMCL/AttentiveNorm\_Detection}{the MS-COCO Detection and Segmentation Repo}.« less
4. Multi-scale Cell Instance Segmentation with Keypoint Graph based Bounding Boxes

   Jingru Yi, Pengxiang Wu ( October 2019 , MICCAI 2019)

   Most existing methods handle cell instance segmentation problems directly without relying on additional detection boxes. These methods generally fails to separate touching cells due to the lack of global understanding of the objects. In contrast, box-based instance segmentation solves this problem by combining object detection with segmentation. However, existing methods typically utilize anchor box-based detectors, which would lead to inferior instance segmentation performance due to the class imbalance issue. In this paper, we propose a new box-based cell instance segmentation method. In particular, we first detect the five pre-defined points of a cell via keypoints detection. Then we group thesemore »points according to a keypoint graph and subsequently extract the bounding box for each cell. Finally, cell segmentation is performed on feature maps within the bounding boxes. We validate our method on two cell datasets with distinct object shapes, and empirically demonstrate the superiority of our method compared to other instance segmentation techniques.« less
5. Computer-Vision Based UAV Inspection for Steel Bridge Connections

   https://doi.org/10.12783/shm2019/32473  

   LEE, JI YOUNG ; SIM, CHUNGWOOK ; DETWEILER, CARRICK ; BARNES, BRENDAN ( November 2019 , Structural Health Monitoring)

   Corrosion on steel bridge members is one of the most important bridge deficiencies that must be carefully monitored by inspectors. Human visual inspection is typically conducted first, and additional measures such as tapping bolts and measuring section losses can be used to assess the level of corrosion. This process becomes a challenge when some of the connections are placed in a location where inspectors have to climb up or down the steel members. To assist this inspection process, we developed a computervision based Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) system for monitoring the health of critical steel bridge connections (bolts, rivets, andmore »pins). We used a UAV to collect images from a steel truss bridge. Then we fed the collected datasets into an instance level segmentation model using a region-based convolutional neural network to train characteristics of corrosion shown at steel connections with sets of labeled image data. The segmentation model identified locations of the connections in images and efficiently detected the members with corrosion on them. We evaluated the model based on how precisely it can detect rivets, bolts, pins, and corrosion damage on these members. The results showed robustness and practicality of our system which can also provide useful health information to bridge owners for future maintenance. These collected image data can be used to quantitatively track temporal changes and to monitor progression of damage in aging steel structures. Furthermore, the system can also assist inspectors in making decisions for further detailed inspections.« less