3DConvCaps: 3DUnet with Convolutional Capsule Encoder for Medical Image Segmentation

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have achieved promising results in medical image segmentation. However, CNNs require lots of training data and are incapable of handling pose and deformation of objects. Furthermore, their pooling layers tend to discard important information such as positions as well as CNNs are sensitive to rotation and affine transformation. Capsule network is a recent new architecture that has achieved better robustness in part-whole representation learning by replacing pooling layers with dynamic routing and convolutional strides, which has shown potential results on popular tasks such as digit classification and object segmentation. In this paper, we propose a 3D encoder-decoder network with Convolutional Capsule Encoder (called 3DConvCaps) to learn lower-level features (short-range attention) with convolutional layers while modeling the higher-level features (long-range dependence) with capsule layers. Our experiments on multiple datasets including iSeg-2017, Hippocampus, and Cardiac demonstrate that our 3D 3DConvCaps network considerably outperforms previous capsule networks and 3D-UNets. We further conduct ablation studies of network efficiency and segmentation performance under various configurations of convolution layers and capsule layers at both contracting and expanding paths.

Self-Supervised Learning via multi-Transformation Classification for Action Recognition

Self-supervised tasks have been utilized to build useful representations that can be used in downstream tasks when the annotation is unavailable. In this paper, we introduce a self-supervised video representation learning method based on the multi-transformation classification to efficiently classify human actions. Self-supervised learning on various transformations not only provides richer contextual information but also enables the visual representation more robust to the transforms. The spatio-temporal representation of the video is learned in a self-supervised manner by classifying seven different transformations i.e. rotation, clip inversion, permutation, split, join transformation, color switch, frame replacement, noise addition. First, seven different video transformations are applied to video clips. Then the 3D convolutional neural networks are utilized to extract features for clips and these features are processed to classify the pseudo-labels. We use the learned models in pretext tasks as the pre-trained models and fine-tune them to recognize human actions in the downstream task. We have conducted the experiments on UCF101 and HMDB51 datasets together with C3D and 3D Resnet-18 as backbone networks. The experimental results have shown that our proposed framework is outperformed other SOTA self-supervised action recognition approaches. The code will be made publicly available.