Variational multichannel multiclass segmentation\endgraf using unsupervised lifting with CNNs

We propose an unsupervised image segmentation approach, that combines a variational energy functional and deep convolutional neural networks. The variational part is based on a recent multichannel multiphase Chan-Vese model, which is capable to extract useful information from multiple input images simultaneously. We implement a flexible multiclass segmentation method that divides a given image into $K$ different regions. We use convolutional neural networks (CNNs) targeting a pre-decomposition of the image. By subsequently minimising the segmentation functional, the final segmentation is obtained in a fully unsupervised manner. Special emphasis is given to the extraction of informative feature maps serving as a starting point for the segmentation. The initial results indicate that the proposed method is able to decompose and segment the different regions of various types of images, such as texture and medical images and compare its performance with another multiphase segmentation method.

A Joint Variational Multichannel Multiphase Segmentation Framework

In this paper, we propose a variational image segmentation framework for multichannel multiphase image segmentation based on the Chan-Vese active contour model. The core of our method lies in finding a variable u encoding the segmentation, by minimizing a multichannel energy functional that combines the information of multiple images. We create a decomposition of the input, either by multichannel filtering, or simply by using plain natural RGB, or medical images, which already consist of several channels. Subsequently we minimize the proposed functional for each of the channels simultaneously. Our model meets the necessary assumptions such that it can be solved efficiently by optimization techniques like the Chambolle-Pock method. We prove that the proposed energy functional has global minimizers, and show its stability and convergence with respect to noisy inputs. Experimental results show that the proposed method performs well in single- and multichannel segmentation tasks, and can be employed to the segmentation of various types of images, such as natural and texture images as well as medical images.