Bringing Background into the Foreground: Making All Classes Equal in Weakly-supervised Video Semantic Segmentation

Pixel-level annotations are expensive and time-consuming to obtain. Hence, weak supervision using only image tags could have a significant impact in semantic segmentation. Recent years have seen great progress in weakly-supervised semantic segmentation, whether from a single image or from videos. However, most existing methods are designed to handle a single background class. In practical applications, such as autonomous navigation, it is often crucial to reason about multiple background classes. In this paper, we introduce an approach to doing so by making use of classifier heatmaps. We then develop a two-stream deep architecture that jointly leverages appearance and motion, and design a loss based on our heatmaps to train it. Our experiments demonstrate the benefits of our classifier heatmaps and of our two-stream architecture on challenging urban scene datasets and on the YouTube-Objects benchmark, where we obtain state-of-the-art results.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figures, 7 tables, Accepted in ICCV 201

Gesture Recognition in Robotic Surgery: a Review

OBJECTIVE: Surgical activity recognition is a fundamental step in computer-assisted interventions. This paper reviews the state-of-the-art in methods for automatic recognition of fine-grained gestures in robotic surgery focusing on recent data-driven approaches and outlines the open questions and future research directions. METHODS: An article search was performed on 5 bibliographic databases with combinations of the following search terms: robotic, robot-assisted, JIGSAWS, surgery, surgical, gesture, fine-grained, surgeme, action, trajectory, segmentation, recognition, parsing. Selected articles were classified based on the level of supervision required for training and divided into different groups representing major frameworks for time series analysis and data modelling. RESULTS: A total of 52 articles were reviewed. The research field is showing rapid expansion, with the majority of articles published in the last 4 years. Deep-learning-based temporal models with discriminative feature extraction and multi-modal data integration have demonstrated promising results on small surgical datasets. Currently, unsupervised methods perform significantly less well than the supervised approaches. CONCLUSION: The development of large and diverse open-source datasets of annotated demonstrations is essential for development and validation of robust solutions for surgical gesture recognition. While new strategies for discriminative feature extraction and knowledge transfer, or unsupervised and semi-supervised approaches, can mitigate the need for data and labels, they have not yet been demonstrated to achieve comparable performance. Important future research directions include detection and forecast of gesture-specific errors and anomalies. SIGNIFICANCE: This paper is a comprehensive and structured analysis of surgical gesture recognition methods aiming to summarize the status of this rapidly evolving field

Can ground truth label propagation from video help semantic segmentation?

For state-of-the-art semantic segmentation task, training convolutional neural networks (CNNs) requires dense pixelwise ground truth (GT) labeling, which is expensive and involves extensive human effort. In this work, we study the possibility of using auxiliary ground truth, so-called \textit{pseudo ground truth} (PGT) to improve the performance. The PGT is obtained by propagating the labels of a GT frame to its subsequent frames in the video using a simple CRF-based, cue integration framework. Our main contribution is to demonstrate the use of noisy PGT along with GT to improve the performance of a CNN. We perform a systematic analysis to find the right kind of PGT that needs to be added along with the GT for training a CNN. In this regard, we explore three aspects of PGT which influence the learning of a CNN: i) the PGT labeling has to be of good quality; ii) the PGT images have to be different compared to the GT images; iii) the PGT has to be trusted differently than GT. We conclude that PGT which is diverse from GT images and has good quality of labeling can indeed help improve the performance of a CNN. Also, when PGT is multiple folds larger than GT, weighing down the trust on PGT helps in improving the accuracy. Finally, We show that using PGT along with GT, the performance of Fully Convolutional Network (FCN) on Camvid data is increased by $2.7\%$ on IoU accuracy. We believe such an approach can be used to train CNNs for semantic video segmentation where sequentially labeled image frames are needed. To this end, we provide recommendations for using PGT strategically for semantic segmentation and hence bypass the need for extensive human efforts in labeling.Comment: To appear at ECCV 2016 Workshop on Video Segmentatio