Domain adaptive segmentation in volume electron microscopy imaging

In the last years, automated segmentation has become a necessary tool for volume electron microscopy (EM) imaging. So far, the best performing techniques have been largely based on fully supervised encoder-decoder CNNs, requiring a substantial amount of annotated images. Domain Adaptation (DA) aims to alleviate the annotation burden by 'adapting' the networks trained on existing groundtruth data (source domain) to work on a different (target) domain with as little additional annotation as possible. Most DA research is focused on the classification task, whereas volume EM segmentation remains rather unexplored. In this work, we extend recently proposed classification DA techniques to an encoder-decoder layout and propose a novel method that adds a reconstruction decoder to the classical encoder-decoder segmentation in order to align source and target encoder features. The method has been validated on the task of segmenting mitochondria in EM volumes. We have performed DA from brain EM images to HeLa cells and from isotropic FIB/SEM volumes to anisotropic TEM volumes. In all cases, the proposed method has outperformed the extended classification DA techniques and the finetuning baseline. An implementation of our work can be found on https://github.com/JorisRoels/domain-adaptive-segmentation

Unsupervised Adaptation for Synthetic-to-Real Handwritten Word Recognition

Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) is still a challenging problem because it must deal with two important difficulties: the variability among writing styles, and the scarcity of labelled data. To alleviate such problems, synthetic data generation and data augmentation are typically used to train HTR systems. However, training with such data produces encouraging but still inaccurate transcriptions in real words. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised writer adaptation approach that is able to automatically adjust a generic handwritten word recognizer, fully trained with synthetic fonts, towards a new incoming writer. We have experimentally validated our proposal using five different datasets, covering several challenges (i) the document source: modern and historic samples, which may involve paper degradation problems; (ii) different handwriting styles: single and multiple writer collections; and (iii) language, which involves different character combinations. Across these challenging collections, we show that our system is able to maintain its performance, thus, it provides a practical and generic approach to deal with new document collections without requiring any expensive and tedious manual annotation step.Comment: Accepted to WACV 202

Class reconstruction driven adversarial domain adaptation for hyperspectral image classification

We address the problem of cross-domain classification of hyperspectral image (HSI) pairs under the notion of unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA). The UDA problem aims at classifying the test samples of a target domain by exploiting the labeled training samples from a related but different source domain. In this respect, the use of adversarial training driven domain classifiers is popular which seeks to learn a shared feature space for both the domains. However, such a formalism apparently fails to ensure the (i) discriminativeness, and (ii) non-redundancy of the learned space. In general, the feature space learned by domain classifier does not convey any meaningful insight regarding the data. On the other hand, we are interested in constraining the space which is deemed to be simultaneously discriminative and reconstructive at the class-scale. In particular, the reconstructive constraint enables the learning of category-specific meaningful feature abstractions and UDA in such a latent space is expected to better associate the domains. On the other hand, we consider an orthogonality constraint to ensure non-redundancy of the learned space. Experimental results obtained on benchmark HSI datasets (Botswana and Pavia) confirm the efficacy of the proposal approach