Automated detection of curvilinear structures, e.g., blood vessels or nerve fibres, from medical and biomedical images is a crucial early step in automatic image interpretation associated to the management of many diseases. Precise measurement of the morphological changes of these curvilinear organ structures informs clinicians for understanding the mechanism, diagnosis, and treatment of e.g. cardiovascular, kidney, eye, lung, and neurological conditions. In this work, we propose a generic and unified convolution neural network for the segmentation of curvilinear structures and illustrate in several 2D/3D medical imaging modalities. We introduce a new curvilinear structure segmentation network (CS2-Net), which includes a self-attention mechanism in the encoder and decoder to learn rich hierarchical representations of curvilinear structures. Two types of attention modules - spatial attention and channel attention - are utilized to enhance the inter-class discrimination and intra-class responsiveness, to further integrate local features with their global dependencies and normalization, adaptively. Furthermore, to facilitate the segmentation of curvilinear structures in medical images, we employ a 1x3 and a 3x1 convolutional kernel to capture boundary features. ...
Person re-identification (Re-ID) via gait features within 3D skeleton sequences is a newly-emerging topic with several advantages. Existing solutions either rely on hand-crafted descriptors or supervised gait representation learning. This paper proposes a self-supervised gait encoding approach that can leverage unlabeled skeleton data to learn gait representations for person Re-ID. Specifically, we first create self-supervision by learning to reconstruct unlabeled skeleton sequences reversely, which involves richer high-level semantics to obtain better gait representations. Other pretext tasks are also explored to further improve self-supervised learning. Second, inspired by the fact that motion's continuity endows adjacent skeletons in one skeleton sequence and temporally consecutive skeleton sequences with higher correlations (referred as locality in 3D skeleton data), we propose a locality-aware attention mechanism and a locality-aware contrastive learning scheme, which aim to preserve locality-awareness on intra-sequence level and inter-sequence level respectively during self-supervised learning. Last, with context vectors learned by our locality-aware attention mechanism and contrastive learning scheme, a novel feature named Constrastive Attention-based Gait Encodings (CAGEs) is designed to represent gait effectively. Empirical evaluations show that our approach significantly outperforms skeleton-based counterparts by 15-40% Rank-1 accuracy, and it even achieves superior performance to numerous multi-modal methods with extra RGB or depth information. Our codes are available at https://github.com/Kali-Hac/Locality-Awareness-SGE.
Gait-based person re-identification (Re-ID) is valuable for safety-critical applications, and using only 3D skeleton data to extract discriminative gait features for person Re-ID is an emerging open topic. Existing methods either adopt hand-crafted features or learn gait features by traditional supervised learning paradigms. Unlike previous methods, we for the first time propose a generic gait encoding approach that can utilize unlabeled skeleton data to learn gait representations in a self-supervised manner. Specifically, we first propose to introduce self-supervision by learning to reconstruct input skeleton sequences in reverse order, which facilitates learning richer high-level semantics and better gait representations. Second, inspired by the fact that motion's continuity endows temporally adjacent skeletons with higher correlations ("locality"), we propose a locality-aware attention mechanism that encourages learning larger attention weights for temporally adjacent skeletons when reconstructing current skeleton, so as to learn locality when encoding gait. Finally, we propose Attention-based Gait Encodings (AGEs), which are built using context vectors learned by locality-aware attention, as final gait representations. AGEs are directly utilized to realize effective person Re-ID. Our approach typically improves existing skeleton-based methods by 10-20% Rank-1 accuracy, and it achieves comparable or even superior performance to multi-modal methods with extra RGB or depth information. Our codes are available at https://github.com/Kali-Hac/SGE-LA.
Action recognition via 3D skeleton data is an emerging important topic in these years. Most existing methods either extract hand-crafted descriptors or learn action representations by supervised learning paradigms that require massive labeled data. In this paper, we for the first time propose a contrastive action learning paradigm named AS-CAL that can leverage different augmentations of unlabeled skeleton data to learn action representations in an unsupervised manner. Specifically, we first propose to contrast similarity between augmented instances (query and key) of the input skeleton sequence, which are transformed by multiple novel augmentation strategies, to learn inherent action patterns ("pattern-invariance") of different skeleton transformations. Second, to encourage learning the pattern-invariance with more consistent action representations, we propose a momentum LSTM, which is implemented as the momentum-based moving average of LSTM based query encoder, to encode long-term action dynamics of the key sequence. Third, we introduce a queue to store the encoded keys, which allows our model to flexibly reuse proceeding keys and build a more consistent dictionary to improve contrastive learning. Last, by temporally averaging the hidden states of action learned by the query encoder, a novel representation named Contrastive Action Encoding (CAE) is proposed to represent human's action effectively. Extensive experiments show that our approach typically improves existing hand-crafted methods by 10-50% top-1 accuracy, and it can achieve comparable or even superior performance to numerous supervised learning methods.
Anomaly detection in retinal image refers to the identification of abnormality caused by various retinal diseases/lesions, by only leveraging normal images in training phase. Normal images from healthy subjects often have regular structures (e.g., the structured blood vessels in the fundus image, or structured anatomy in optical coherence tomography image). On the contrary, the diseases and lesions often destroy these structures. Motivated by this, we propose to leverage the relation between the image texture and structure to design a deep neural network for anomaly detection. Specifically, we first extract the structure of the retinal images, then we combine both the structure features and the last layer features extracted from original health image to reconstruct the original input healthy image. The image feature provides the texture information and guarantees the uniqueness of the image recovered from the structure. In the end, we further utilize the reconstructed image to extract the structure and measure the difference between structure extracted from original and the reconstructed image. On the one hand, minimizing the reconstruction difference behaves like a regularizer to guarantee that the image is corrected reconstructed. On the other hand, such structure difference can also be used as a metric for normality measurement. The whole network is termed as P-Net because it has a ``P'' shape. Extensive experiments on RESC dataset and iSee dataset validate the effectiveness of our approach for anomaly detection in retinal images. Further, our method also generalizes well to novel class discovery in retinal images and anomaly detection in real-world images.
Deformation field estimation is an important and challenging issue in many medical image registration applications. In recent years, deep learning technique has become a promising approach for simplifying registration problems, and has been gradually applied to medical image registration. However, most existing deep learning registrations do not consider the problem that when the receptive field cannot cover the corresponding features in the moving image and the fixed image, it cannot output accurate displacement values. In fact, due to the limitation of the receptive field, the 3 x 3 kernel has difficulty in covering the corresponding features at high/original resolution. Multi-resolution and multi-convolution techniques can improve but fail to avoid this problem. In this study, we constructed pyramidal feature sets on moving and fixed images and used the warped moving and fixed features to estimate their "residual" deformation field at each scale, called the Pyramidal Residual Deformation Field Estimation module (PRDFE-Module). The "total" deformation field at each scale was computed by upsampling and weighted summing all the "residual" deformation fields at all its previous scales, which can effectively and accurately transfer the deformation fields from low resolution to high resolution and is used for warping the moving features at each scale. Simulation and real brain data results show that our method improves the accuracy of the registration and the rationality of the deformation field.
Human gait refers to a daily motion that represents not only mobility, but it can also be used to identify the walker by either human observers or computers. Recent studies reveal that gait even conveys information about the walker's emotion. Individuals in different emotion states may show different gait patterns. The mapping between various emotions and gait patterns provides a new source for automated emotion recognition. Compared to traditional emotion detection biometrics, such as facial expression, speech and physiological parameters, gait is remotely observable, more difficult to imitate, and requires less cooperation from the subject. These advantages make gait a promising source for emotion detection. This article reviews current research on gait-based emotion detection, particularly on how gait parameters can be affected by different emotion states and how the emotion states can be recognized through distinct gait patterns. We focus on the detailed methods and techniques applied in the whole process of emotion recognition: data collection, preprocessing, and classification. At last, we discuss possible future developments of efficient and effective gait-based emotion recognition using the state of the art techniques on intelligent computation and big data.
With the development of convolutional neural network, deep learning has shown its success for retinal disease detection from optical coherence tomography (OCT) images. However, deep learning often relies on large scale labelled data for training, which is oftentimes challenging especially for disease with low occurrence. Moreover, a deep learning system trained from data-set with one or a few diseases is unable to detect other unseen diseases, which limits the practical usage of the system in disease screening. To address the limitation, we propose a novel anomaly detection framework termed Sparsity-constrained Generative Adversarial Network (Sparse-GAN) for disease screening where only healthy data are available in the training set. The contributions of Sparse-GAN are two-folds: 1) The proposed Sparse-GAN predicts the anomalies in latent space rather than image-level; 2) Sparse-GAN is constrained by a novel Sparsity Regularization Net. Furthermore, in light of the role of lesions for disease screening, we present to leverage on an anomaly activation map to show the heatmap of lesions. We evaluate our proposed Sparse-GAN on a publicly available dataset, and the results show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.