GLSFormer: Gated - Long, Short Sequence Transformer for Step Recognition in Surgical Videos

Automated surgical step recognition is an important task that can significantly improve patient safety and decision-making during surgeries. Existing state-of-the-art methods for surgical step recognition either rely on separate, multi-stage modeling of spatial and temporal information or operate on short-range temporal resolution when learned jointly. However, the benefits of joint modeling of spatio-temporal features and long-range information are not taken in account. In this paper, we propose a vision transformer-based approach to jointly learn spatio-temporal features directly from sequence of frame-level patches. Our method incorporates a gated-temporal attention mechanism that intelligently combines short-term and long-term spatio-temporal feature representations. We extensively evaluate our approach on two cataract surgery video datasets, namely Cataract-101 and D99, and demonstrate superior performance compared to various state-of-the-art methods. These results validate the suitability of our proposed approach for automated surgical step recognition. Our code is released at: https://github.com/nisargshah1999/GLSFormer

ALAP-AE: As-Lite-as-Possible Auto-Encoder

We present a novel algorithm to reduce tensor compute required by a conditional image generation autoencoder and make it as-lite-as-possible, without sacrificing quality of photo-realistic image generation. Our method is device agnostic, and can optimize an autoencoder for a given CPU-only, GPU compute device(s) in about normal time it takes to train an autoencoder on a generic workstation. We achieve this via a two-stage novel strategy where, first, we condense the channel weights, such that, as few as possible channels are used. Then, we prune the nearly zeroed out weight activations, and fine-tune this lite autoencoder. To maintain image quality, fine-tuning is done via student-teacher training, where we reuse the condensed autoencoder as the teacher. We show performance gains for various conditional image generation tasks: segmentation mask to face images, face images to cartoonization, and finally CycleGAN-based model on horse to zebra dataset over multiple compute devices. We perform various ablation studies to justify the claims and design choices, and achieve real-time versions of various autoencoders on CPU-only devices while maintaining image quality, thus enabling at-scale deployment of such autoencoders.

Can No-reference features help in Full-reference image quality estimation?

Development of perceptual image quality assessment (IQA) metrics has been of significant interest to computer vision community. The aim of these metrics is to model quality of an image as perceived by humans. Recent works in Full-reference IQA research perform pixelwise comparison between deep features corresponding to query and reference images for quality prediction. However, pixelwise feature comparison may not be meaningful if distortion present in query image is severe. In this context, we explore utilization of no-reference features in Full-reference IQA task. Our model consists of both full-reference and no-reference branches. Full-reference branches use both distorted and reference images, whereas No-reference branch only uses distorted image. Our experiments show that use of no-reference features boosts performance of image quality assessment. Our model achieves higher SRCC and KRCC scores than a number of state-of-the-art algorithms on KADID-10K and PIPAL datasets.

ADAM Challenge: Detecting Age-related Macular Degeneration from Fundus Images

Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is the leading cause of visual impairment among elderly in the world. Early detection of AMD is of great importance as the vision loss caused by AMD is irreversible and permanent. Color fundus photography is the most cost-effective imaging modality to screen for retinal disorders. \textcolor{red}{Recently, some algorithms based on deep learning had been developed for fundus image analysis and automatic AMD detection. However, a comprehensive annotated dataset and a standard evaluation benchmark are still missing.} To deal with this issue, we set up the Automatic Detection challenge on Age-related Macular degeneration (ADAM) for the first time, held as a satellite event of the ISBI 2020 conference. The ADAM challenge consisted of four tasks which cover the main topics in detecting AMD from fundus images, including classification of AMD, detection and segmentation of optic disc, localization of fovea, and detection and segmentation of lesions. The ADAM challenge has released a comprehensive dataset of 1200 fundus images with the category labels of AMD, the pixel-wise segmentation masks of the full optic disc and lesions (drusen, exudate, hemorrhage, scar, and other), as well as the location coordinates of the macular fovea. A uniform evaluation framework has been built to make a fair comparison of different models. During the ADAM challenge, 610 results were submitted for online evaluation, and finally, 11 teams participated in the onsite challenge. This paper introduces the challenge, dataset, and evaluation methods, as well as summarizes the methods and analyzes the results of the participating teams of each task. In particular, we observed that ensembling strategy and clinical prior knowledge can better improve the performances of the deep learning models.

Anomaly Detection in Retinal Images using Multi-Scale Deep Feature Sparse Coding

Convolutional Neural Network models have successfully detected retinal illness from optical coherence tomography (OCT) and fundus images. These CNN models frequently rely on vast amounts of labeled data for training, difficult to obtain, especially for rare diseases. Furthermore, a deep learning system trained on a data set with only one or a few diseases cannot detect other diseases, limiting the system's practical use in disease identification. We have introduced an unsupervised approach for detecting anomalies in retinal images to overcome this issue. We have proposed a simple, memory efficient, easy to train method which followed a multi-step training technique that incorporated autoencoder training and Multi-Scale Deep Feature Sparse Coding (MDFSC), an extended version of normal sparse coding, to accommodate diverse types of retinal datasets. We achieve relative AUC score improvement of 7.8\%, 6.7\% and 12.1\% over state-of-the-art SPADE on Eye-Q, IDRiD and OCTID datasets respectively.

QU-BraTS: MICCAI BraTS 2020 Challenge on Quantifying Uncertainty in Brain Tumor Segmentation -- Analysis of Ranking Metrics and Benchmarking Results

Deep learning (DL) models have provided the state-of-the-art performance in a wide variety of medical imaging benchmarking challenges, including the Brain Tumor Segmentation (BraTS) challenges. However, the task of focal pathology multi-compartment segmentation (e.g., tumor and lesion sub-regions) is particularly challenging, and potential errors hinder the translation of DL models into clinical workflows. Quantifying the reliability of DL model predictions in the form of uncertainties, could enable clinical review of the most uncertain regions, thereby building trust and paving the way towards clinical translation. Recently, a number of uncertainty estimation methods have been introduced for DL medical image segmentation tasks. Developing metrics to evaluate and compare the performance of uncertainty measures will assist the end-user in making more informed decisions. In this study, we explore and evaluate a metric developed during the BraTS 2019-2020 task on uncertainty quantification (QU-BraTS), and designed to assess and rank uncertainty estimates for brain tumor multi-compartment segmentation. This metric (1) rewards uncertainty estimates that produce high confidence in correct assertions, and those that assign low confidence levels at incorrect assertions, and (2) penalizes uncertainty measures that lead to a higher percentages of under-confident correct assertions. We further benchmark the segmentation uncertainties generated by 14 independent participating teams of QU-BraTS 2020, all of which also participated in the main BraTS segmentation task. Overall, our findings confirm the importance and complementary value that uncertainty estimates provide to segmentation algorithms, and hence highlight the need for uncertainty quantification in medical image analyses. Our evaluation code is made publicly available at https://github.com/RagMeh11/QU-BraTS.

MSR-Net: Multi-Scale Relighting Network for One-to-One Relighting

Deep image relighting allows photo enhancement by illumination-specific retouching without human effort and so it is getting much interest lately. Most of the existing popular methods available for relighting are run-time intensive and memory inefficient. Keeping these issues in mind, we propose the use of Stacked Deep Multi-Scale Hierarchical Network, which aggregates features from each image at different scales. Our solution is differentiable and robust for translating image illumination setting from input image to target image. Additionally, we have also shown that using a multi-step training approach to this problem with two different loss functions can significantly boost performance and can achieve a high quality reconstruction of a relighted image.

Fast and Accurate Quantized Camera Scene Detection on Smartphones, Mobile AI 2021 Challenge: Report

Camera scene detection is among the most popular computer vision problem on smartphones. While many custom solutions were developed for this task by phone vendors, none of the designed models were available publicly up until now. To address this problem, we introduce the first Mobile AI challenge, where the target is to develop quantized deep learning-based camera scene classification solutions that can demonstrate a real-time performance on smartphones and IoT platforms. For this, the participants were provided with a large-scale CamSDD dataset consisting of more than 11K images belonging to the 30 most important scene categories. The runtime of all models was evaluated on the popular Apple Bionic A11 platform that can be found in many iOS devices. The proposed solutions are fully compatible with all major mobile AI accelerators and can demonstrate more than 100-200 FPS on the majority of recent smartphone platforms while achieving a top-3 accuracy of more than 98%. A detailed description of all models developed in the challenge is provided in this paper.

Stacked Deep Multi-Scale Hierarchical Network for Fast Bokeh Effect Rendering from a Single Image

The Bokeh Effect is one of the most desirable effects in photography for rendering artistic and aesthetic photos. Usually, it requires a DSLR camera with different aperture and shutter settings and certain photography skills to generate this effect. In smartphones, computational methods and additional sensors are used to overcome the physical lens and sensor limitations to achieve such effect. Most of the existing methods utilized additional sensor's data or pretrained network for fine depth estimation of the scene and sometimes use portrait segmentation pretrained network module to segment salient objects in the image. Because of these reasons, networks have many parameters, become runtime intensive and unable to run in mid-range devices. In this paper, we used an end-to-end Deep Multi-Scale Hierarchical Network (DMSHN) model for direct Bokeh effect rendering of images captured from the monocular camera. To further improve the perceptual quality of such effect, a stacked model consisting of two DMSHN modules is also proposed. Our model does not rely on any pretrained network module for Monocular Depth Estimation or Saliency Detection, thus significantly reducing the size of model and run time. Stacked DMSHN achieves state-of-the-art results on a large scale EBB! dataset with around 6x less runtime compared to the current state-of-the-art model in processing HD quality images.