We present Deep Region Competition (DRC), an algorithm designed to extract foreground objects from images in a fully unsupervised manner. Foreground extraction can be viewed as a special case of generic image segmentation that focuses on identifying and disentangling objects from the background. In this work, we rethink the foreground extraction by reconciling energy-based prior with generative image modeling in the form of Mixture of Experts (MoE), where we further introduce the learned pixel re-assignment as the essential inductive bias to capture the regularities of background regions. With this modeling, the foreground/background partition can be naturally found through Expectation-Maximization
(EM). We show that the proposed method effectively exploits the interaction between the mixture components during the partitioning process, which closely connects to region competition, a seminal approach for generic image segmentation. Experiments demonstrate that DRC exhibits more competitive performances on complex real-world data and challenging multi-object scenes compared with prior methods. Moreover, we show empirically that DRC can potentially generalize to novel foreground objects even from categories unseen during training.
more »
« less
Information-Theoretic Segmentation by Inpainting Error Maximization
We study image segmentation from an information-theoretic perspective, proposing a novel adversarial method that performs unsupervised segmentation by partitioning images into maximally independent sets. More specifically, we group image pixels into foreground and background, with the goal of minimizing predictability of one set from the other. An easily computed loss drives a greedy search process to maximize inpainting error over these partitions. Our method does not involve training deep networks, is computationally cheap, class-agnostic, and even applicable in isolation to a single unlabeled image. Experiments demonstrate that it achieves a new state-of-the-art in unsupervised segmentation quality, while being substantially faster and more general than competing approaches.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1925101
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10291619
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
- ISSN:
- 2332-564X
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
null (Ed.)Salient segmentation is a critical step in biomedical image analysis, aiming to cut out regions that are most interesting to humans. Recently, supervised methods have achieved promising results in biomedical areas, but they depend on annotated training data sets, which requires labor and proficiency in related background knowledge. In contrast, unsupervised learning makes data-driven decisions by obtaining insights directly from the data themselves. In this paper, we propose a completely unsupervised self-aware network based on pre-training and attentional backpropagation for biomedical salient segmentation, named as PUB-SalNet. Firstly, we aggregate a new biomedical data set from several simulated Cellular Electron Cryo-Tomography (CECT) data sets featuring rich salient objects, different SNR settings, and various resolutions, which is called SalSeg-CECT. Based on the SalSeg-CECT data set, we then pre-train a model specially designed for biomedical tasks as a backbone module to initialize network parameters. Next, we present a U-SalNet network to learn to selectively attend to salient objects. It includes two types of attention modules to facilitate learning saliency through global contrast and local similarity. Lastly, we jointly refine the salient regions together with feature representations from U-SalNet, with the parameters updated by self-aware attentional backpropagation. We apply PUB-SalNet for analysis of 2D simulated and real images and achieve state-of-the-art performance on simulated biomedical data sets. Furthermore, our proposed PUB-SalNet can be easily extended to 3D images. The experimental results on the 2d and 3d data sets also demonstrate the generalization ability and robustness of our method.more » « less
-
more » « less
Unsupervised domain adaptation for semantic segmentation has been intensively studied due to the low cost of the pixel-level annotation for synthetic data. The most common approaches try to generate images or features mimicking the distribution in the target domain while preserving the semantic contents in the source domain so that a model can be trained with annotations from the latter. However, such methods highly rely on an image translator or feature extractor trained in an elaborated mechanism including adversarial training, which brings in extra complexity and instability in the adaptation process. Furthermore, these methods mainly focus on taking advantage of the labeled source dataset, leaving the unlabeled target dataset not fully utilized. In this paper, we propose a bidirectional style-induced domain adaptation method, called BiSIDA, that employs consistency regularization to efficiently exploit information from the unlabeled target domain dataset, requiring only a simple neural style transfer model. BiSIDA aligns domains by not only transferring source images into the style of target images but also transferring target images into the style of source images to perform high-dimensional perturbation on the unlabeled target images, which is crucial to the success in applying consistency regularization in segmentation tasks. Extensive experiments show that our BiSIDA achieves new state-of-the-art on two commonly-used synthetic-to-real domain adaptation benchmarks: GTA5-to-CityScapes and SYNTHIA-to-CityScapes. Code and pretrained style transfer model are available at: https://github.com/wangkaihong/BiSIDA.
-
Domain adaptation is critical for success in new, unseen environments. Adversarial adaptation models have shown tremendous progress towards adapting to new environments by focusing either on discovering domain invariant representations or by mapping between unpaired image domains. While feature space methods are difficult to interpret and sometimes fail to capture pixel-level and low-level domain shifts, image space methods sometimes fail to incorporate high level semantic knowledge relevant for the end task. We propose a model which adapts between domains using both generative image space alignment and latent representation space alignment. Our approach, Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Domain Adaptation (CyCADA), guides transfer between domains according to a specific discriminatively trained task and avoids divergence by enforcing consistency of the relevant semantics before and after adaptation. We evaluate our method on a variety of visual recognition and prediction settings, including digit classification and semantic segmentation of road scenes, advancing state-of-the-art performance for unsupervised adaptation from synthetic to real world driving domains.more » « less
-
more » « less
Abstract Electron backscattering diffraction provides the analysis of crystalline phases at large scales (microns) while precession electron diffraction may be used to get 4D‐STEM data to elucidate structure at nanometric resolution. Both are limited by the probe size and also exhibit some difficulties for the generation of large datasets, given the inherent complexity of image acquisition. The latter appoints the application of advanced machine learning techniques, such as deep learning adapted for several tasks, including pattern matching, image segmentation, etc. This research aims to show how Gabor filters provide an appropriate feature extraction technique for electron microscopy images that could prevent the need of large volumes of data to train deep learning models. The work presented herein combines an algorithm based on Gabor filters for feature extraction and an unsupervised learning method to perform particle segmentation of polyhedral metallic nanoparticles and crystal orientation mapping at atomic scale. Experimental results have shown that Gabor filters are convenient for electron microscopy images analysis, that even a nonsupervised learning algorithm can provide remarkable results in crystal segmentation of individual nanoparticles. This approach enables its application to dynamic analysis of particle transformation recorded with aberration‐corrected microscopy, offering new possibilities of analysis at nanometric scale.
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- The DOI is not currently available.
