12,805 research outputs found
NiftyNet: a deep-learning platform for medical imaging
Medical image analysis and computer-assisted intervention problems are
increasingly being addressed with deep-learning-based solutions. Established
deep-learning platforms are flexible but do not provide specific functionality
for medical image analysis and adapting them for this application requires
substantial implementation effort. Thus, there has been substantial duplication
of effort and incompatible infrastructure developed across many research
groups. This work presents the open-source NiftyNet platform for deep learning
in medical imaging. The ambition of NiftyNet is to accelerate and simplify the
development of these solutions, and to provide a common mechanism for
disseminating research outputs for the community to use, adapt and build upon.
NiftyNet provides a modular deep-learning pipeline for a range of medical
imaging applications including segmentation, regression, image generation and
representation learning applications. Components of the NiftyNet pipeline
including data loading, data augmentation, network architectures, loss
functions and evaluation metrics are tailored to, and take advantage of, the
idiosyncracies of medical image analysis and computer-assisted intervention.
NiftyNet is built on TensorFlow and supports TensorBoard visualization of 2D
and 3D images and computational graphs by default.
We present 3 illustrative medical image analysis applications built using
NiftyNet: (1) segmentation of multiple abdominal organs from computed
tomography; (2) image regression to predict computed tomography attenuation
maps from brain magnetic resonance images; and (3) generation of simulated
ultrasound images for specified anatomical poses.
NiftyNet enables researchers to rapidly develop and distribute deep learning
solutions for segmentation, regression, image generation and representation
learning applications, or extend the platform to new applications.Comment: Wenqi Li and Eli Gibson contributed equally to this work. M. Jorge
Cardoso and Tom Vercauteren contributed equally to this work. 26 pages, 6
figures; Update includes additional applications, updated author list and
formatting for journal submissio
Reconstructive Sparse Code Transfer for Contour Detection and Semantic Labeling
We frame the task of predicting a semantic labeling as a sparse
reconstruction procedure that applies a target-specific learned transfer
function to a generic deep sparse code representation of an image. This
strategy partitions training into two distinct stages. First, in an
unsupervised manner, we learn a set of generic dictionaries optimized for
sparse coding of image patches. We train a multilayer representation via
recursive sparse dictionary learning on pooled codes output by earlier layers.
Second, we encode all training images with the generic dictionaries and learn a
transfer function that optimizes reconstruction of patches extracted from
annotated ground-truth given the sparse codes of their corresponding image
patches. At test time, we encode a novel image using the generic dictionaries
and then reconstruct using the transfer function. The output reconstruction is
a semantic labeling of the test image.
Applying this strategy to the task of contour detection, we demonstrate
performance competitive with state-of-the-art systems. Unlike almost all prior
work, our approach obviates the need for any form of hand-designed features or
filters. To illustrate general applicability, we also show initial results on
semantic part labeling of human faces.
The effectiveness of our approach opens new avenues for research on deep
sparse representations. Our classifiers utilize this representation in a novel
manner. Rather than acting on nodes in the deepest layer, they attach to nodes
along a slice through multiple layers of the network in order to make
predictions about local patches. Our flexible combination of a generatively
learned sparse representation with discriminatively trained transfer
classifiers extends the notion of sparse reconstruction to encompass arbitrary
semantic labeling tasks.Comment: to appear in Asian Conference on Computer Vision (ACCV), 201
Machine learning methods for histopathological image analysis
Abundant accumulation of digital histopathological images has led to the
increased demand for their analysis, such as computer-aided diagnosis using
machine learning techniques. However, digital pathological images and related
tasks have some issues to be considered. In this mini-review, we introduce the
application of digital pathological image analysis using machine learning
algorithms, address some problems specific to such analysis, and propose
possible solutions.Comment: 23 pages, 4 figure
Annotating Object Instances with a Polygon-RNN
We propose an approach for semi-automatic annotation of object instances.
While most current methods treat object segmentation as a pixel-labeling
problem, we here cast it as a polygon prediction task, mimicking how most
current datasets have been annotated. In particular, our approach takes as
input an image crop and sequentially produces vertices of the polygon outlining
the object. This allows a human annotator to interfere at any time and correct
a vertex if needed, producing as accurate segmentation as desired by the
annotator. We show that our approach speeds up the annotation process by a
factor of 4.7 across all classes in Cityscapes, while achieving 78.4% agreement
in IoU with original ground-truth, matching the typical agreement between human
annotators. For cars, our speed-up factor is 7.3 for an agreement of 82.2%. We
further show generalization capabilities of our approach to unseen datasets
Crowdsourcing in Computer Vision
Computer vision systems require large amounts of manually annotated data to
properly learn challenging visual concepts. Crowdsourcing platforms offer an
inexpensive method to capture human knowledge and understanding, for a vast
number of visual perception tasks. In this survey, we describe the types of
annotations computer vision researchers have collected using crowdsourcing, and
how they have ensured that this data is of high quality while annotation effort
is minimized. We begin by discussing data collection on both classic (e.g.,
object recognition) and recent (e.g., visual story-telling) vision tasks. We
then summarize key design decisions for creating effective data collection
interfaces and workflows, and present strategies for intelligently selecting
the most important data instances to annotate. Finally, we conclude with some
thoughts on the future of crowdsourcing in computer vision.Comment: A 69-page meta review of the field, Foundations and Trends in
Computer Graphics and Vision, 201
Fair comparison of skin detection approaches on publicly available datasets
Skin detection is the process of discriminating skin and non-skin regions in
a digital image and it is widely used in several applications ranging from hand
gesture analysis to track body parts and face detection. Skin detection is a
challenging problem which has drawn extensive attention from the research
community, nevertheless a fair comparison among approaches is very difficult
due to the lack of a common benchmark and a unified testing protocol. In this
work, we investigate the most recent researches in this field and we propose a
fair comparison among approaches using several different datasets. The major
contributions of this work are an exhaustive literature review of skin color
detection approaches, a framework to evaluate and combine different skin
detector approaches, whose source code is made freely available for future
research, and an extensive experimental comparison among several recent methods
which have also been used to define an ensemble that works well in many
different problems. Experiments are carried out in 10 different datasets
including more than 10000 labelled images: experimental results confirm that
the best method here proposed obtains a very good performance with respect to
other stand-alone approaches, without requiring ad hoc parameter tuning. A
MATLAB version of the framework for testing and of the methods proposed in this
paper will be freely available from https://github.com/LorisNann
- …