Weakly Supervised Learning of Objects, Attributes and Their Associations

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10605-2_31]”

DeepCut: Object Segmentation from Bounding Box Annotations using Convolutional Neural Networks

In this paper, we propose DeepCut, a method to obtain pixelwise object segmentations given an image dataset labelled with bounding box annotations. It extends the approach of the well-known GrabCut method to include machine learning by training a neural network classifier from bounding box annotations. We formulate the problem as an energy minimisation problem over a densely-connected conditional random field and iteratively update the training targets to obtain pixelwise object segmentations. Additionally, we propose variants of the DeepCut method and compare those to a naive approach to CNN training under weak supervision. We test its applicability to solve brain and lung segmentation problems on a challenging fetal magnetic resonance dataset and obtain encouraging results in terms of accuracy

Weakly- and Semi-Supervised Panoptic Segmentation

We present a weakly supervised model that jointly performs both semantic- and instance-segmentation -- a particularly relevant problem given the substantial cost of obtaining pixel-perfect annotation for these tasks. In contrast to many popular instance segmentation approaches based on object detectors, our method does not predict any overlapping instances. Moreover, we are able to segment both "thing" and "stuff" classes, and thus explain all the pixels in the image. "Thing" classes are weakly-supervised with bounding boxes, and "stuff" with image-level tags. We obtain state-of-the-art results on Pascal VOC, for both full and weak supervision (which achieves about 95% of fully-supervised performance). Furthermore, we present the first weakly-supervised results on Cityscapes for both semantic- and instance-segmentation. Finally, we use our weakly supervised framework to analyse the relationship between annotation quality and predictive performance, which is of interest to dataset creators.Comment: ECCV 2018. The first two authors contributed equall

Learning to detect chest radiographs containing lung nodules using visual attention networks

Machine learning approaches hold great potential for the automated detection of lung nodules in chest radiographs, but training the algorithms requires vary large amounts of manually annotated images, which are difficult to obtain. Weak labels indicating whether a radiograph is likely to contain pulmonary nodules are typically easier to obtain at scale by parsing historical free-text radiological reports associated to the radiographs. Using a repositotory of over 700,000 chest radiographs, in this study we demonstrate that promising nodule detection performance can be achieved using weak labels through convolutional neural networks for radiograph classification. We propose two network architectures for the classification of images likely to contain pulmonary nodules using both weak labels and manually-delineated bounding boxes, when these are available. Annotated nodules are used at training time to deliver a visual attention mechanism informing the model about its localisation performance. The first architecture extracts saliency maps from high-level convolutional layers and compares the estimated position of a nodule against the ground truth, when this is available. A corresponding localisation error is then back-propagated along with the softmax classification error. The second approach consists of a recurrent attention model that learns to observe a short sequence of smaller image portions through reinforcement learning. When a nodule annotation is available at training time, the reward function is modified accordingly so that exploring portions of the radiographs away from a nodule incurs a larger penalty. Our empirical results demonstrate the potential advantages of these architectures in comparison to competing methodologies