25,228 research outputs found
Convolutional Sparse Kernel Network for Unsupervised Medical Image Analysis
The availability of large-scale annotated image datasets and recent advances
in supervised deep learning methods enable the end-to-end derivation of
representative image features that can impact a variety of image analysis
problems. Such supervised approaches, however, are difficult to implement in
the medical domain where large volumes of labelled data are difficult to obtain
due to the complexity of manual annotation and inter- and intra-observer
variability in label assignment. We propose a new convolutional sparse kernel
network (CSKN), which is a hierarchical unsupervised feature learning framework
that addresses the challenge of learning representative visual features in
medical image analysis domains where there is a lack of annotated training
data. Our framework has three contributions: (i) We extend kernel learning to
identify and represent invariant features across image sub-patches in an
unsupervised manner. (ii) We initialise our kernel learning with a layer-wise
pre-training scheme that leverages the sparsity inherent in medical images to
extract initial discriminative features. (iii) We adapt a multi-scale spatial
pyramid pooling (SPP) framework to capture subtle geometric differences between
learned visual features. We evaluated our framework in medical image retrieval
and classification on three public datasets. Our results show that our CSKN had
better accuracy when compared to other conventional unsupervised methods and
comparable accuracy to methods that used state-of-the-art supervised
convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Our findings indicate that our
unsupervised CSKN provides an opportunity to leverage unannotated big data in
medical imaging repositories.Comment: Accepted by Medical Image Analysis (with a new title 'Convolutional
Sparse Kernel Network for Unsupervised Medical Image Analysis'). The
manuscript is available from following link
(https://doi.org/10.1016/j.media.2019.06.005
Sparse visual models for biologically inspired sensorimotor control
Given the importance of using resources efficiently in the competition for survival, it is reasonable to think that natural evolution has discovered efficient cortical coding strategies for representing natural visual information. Sparse representations have intrinsic advantages in terms of fault-tolerance and low-power consumption potential, and can therefore be attractive for robot sensorimotor control with powerful dispositions for decision-making. Inspired by the mammalian brain and its visual ventral pathway, we present in this paper a hierarchical sparse coding network architecture that extracts visual features for use in sensorimotor control. Testing with natural images demonstrates that this sparse coding facilitates processing and learning in subsequent layers. Previous studies have shown how the responses of complex cells could be sparsely represented by a higher-order neural layer. Here we extend sparse coding in each network layer, showing that detailed modeling of earlier stages in the visual pathway enhances the characteristics of the receptive fields developed in subsequent stages. The yield network is more dynamic with richer and more biologically plausible input and output representation
- …