7,676 research outputs found
Multi-stage Multi-recursive-input Fully Convolutional Networks for Neuronal Boundary Detection
In the field of connectomics, neuroscientists seek to identify cortical
connectivity comprehensively. Neuronal boundary detection from the Electron
Microscopy (EM) images is often done to assist the automatic reconstruction of
neuronal circuit. But the segmentation of EM images is a challenging problem,
as it requires the detector to be able to detect both filament-like thin and
blob-like thick membrane, while suppressing the ambiguous intracellular
structure. In this paper, we propose multi-stage multi-recursive-input fully
convolutional networks to address this problem. The multiple recursive inputs
for one stage, i.e., the multiple side outputs with different receptive field
sizes learned from the lower stage, provide multi-scale contextual boundary
information for the consecutive learning. This design is
biologically-plausible, as it likes a human visual system to compare different
possible segmentation solutions to address the ambiguous boundary issue. Our
multi-stage networks are trained end-to-end. It achieves promising results on
two public available EM segmentation datasets, the mouse piriform cortex
dataset and the ISBI 2012 EM dataset.Comment: Accepted by ICCV201
Colour Constancy: Biologically-inspired Contrast Variant Pooling Mechanism
Pooling is a ubiquitous operation in image processing algorithms that allows
for higher-level processes to collect relevant low-level features from a region
of interest. Currently, max-pooling is one of the most commonly used operators
in the computational literature. However, it can lack robustness to outliers
due to the fact that it relies merely on the peak of a function. Pooling
mechanisms are also present in the primate visual cortex where neurons of
higher cortical areas pool signals from lower ones. The receptive fields of
these neurons have been shown to vary according to the contrast by aggregating
signals over a larger region in the presence of low contrast stimuli. We
hypothesise that this contrast-variant-pooling mechanism can address some of
the shortcomings of max-pooling. We modelled this contrast variation through a
histogram clipping in which the percentage of pooled signal is inversely
proportional to the local contrast of an image. We tested our hypothesis by
applying it to the phenomenon of colour constancy where a number of popular
algorithms utilise a max-pooling step (e.g. White-Patch, Grey-Edge and
Double-Opponency). For each of these methods, we investigated the consequences
of replacing their original max-pooling by the proposed
contrast-variant-pooling. Our experiments on three colour constancy benchmark
datasets suggest that previous results can significantly improve by adopting a
contrast-variant-pooling mechanism
Recursive Training of 2D-3D Convolutional Networks for Neuronal Boundary Detection
Efforts to automate the reconstruction of neural circuits from 3D electron
microscopic (EM) brain images are critical for the field of connectomics. An
important computation for reconstruction is the detection of neuronal
boundaries. Images acquired by serial section EM, a leading 3D EM technique,
are highly anisotropic, with inferior quality along the third dimension. For
such images, the 2D max-pooling convolutional network has set the standard for
performance at boundary detection. Here we achieve a substantial gain in
accuracy through three innovations. Following the trend towards deeper networks
for object recognition, we use a much deeper network than previously employed
for boundary detection. Second, we incorporate 3D as well as 2D filters, to
enable computations that use 3D context. Finally, we adopt a recursively
trained architecture in which a first network generates a preliminary boundary
map that is provided as input along with the original image to a second network
that generates a final boundary map. Backpropagation training is accelerated by
ZNN, a new implementation of 3D convolutional networks that uses multicore CPU
parallelism for speed. Our hybrid 2D-3D architecture could be more generally
applicable to other types of anisotropic 3D images, including video, and our
recursive framework for any image labeling problem
Rapid Visual Categorization is not Guided by Early Salience-Based Selection
The current dominant visual processing paradigm in both human and machine
research is the feedforward, layered hierarchy of neural-like processing
elements. Within this paradigm, visual saliency is seen by many to have a
specific role, namely that of early selection. Early selection is thought to
enable very fast visual performance by limiting processing to only the most
salient candidate portions of an image. This strategy has led to a plethora of
saliency algorithms that have indeed improved processing time efficiency in
machine algorithms, which in turn have strengthened the suggestion that human
vision also employs a similar early selection strategy. However, at least one
set of critical tests of this idea has never been performed with respect to the
role of early selection in human vision. How would the best of the current
saliency models perform on the stimuli used by experimentalists who first
provided evidence for this visual processing paradigm? Would the algorithms
really provide correct candidate sub-images to enable fast categorization on
those same images? Do humans really need this early selection for their
impressive performance? Here, we report on a new series of tests of these
questions whose results suggest that it is quite unlikely that such an early
selection process has any role in human rapid visual categorization.Comment: 22 pages, 9 figure
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