CellTypeGraph: A New Geometric Computer Vision Benchmark

Classifying all cells in an organ is a relevant and difficult problem from plant developmental biology. We here abstract the problem into a new benchmark for node classification in a geo-referenced graph. Solving it requires learning the spatial layout of the organ including symmetries. To allow the convenient testing of new geometrical learning methods, the benchmark of Arabidopsis thaliana ovules is made available as a PyTorch data loader, along with a large number of precomputed features. Finally, we benchmark eight recent graph neural network architectures, finding that DeeperGCN currently works best on this problem.

End-to-End Learned Random Walker for Seeded Image Segmentation

We present an end-to-end learned algorithm for seeded segmentation. Our method is based on the Random Walker algorithm, where we predict the edge weights of the underlying graph using a convolutional neural network. This can be interpreted as learning context-dependent diffusivities for a linear diffusion process. Besides calculating the exact gradient for optimizing these diffusivities, we also propose simplifications that sparsely sample the gradient and still yield competitive results. The proposed method achieves the currently best results on a seeded version of the CREMI neuron segmentation challenge.