DeepBranchTracer: A Generally-Applicable Approach to Curvilinear Structure Reconstruction Using Multi-Feature Learning

Curvilinear structures, which include line-like continuous objects, are fundamental geometrical elements in image-based applications. Reconstructing these structures from images constitutes a pivotal research area in computer vision. However, the complex topology and ambiguous image evidence render this process a challenging task. In this paper, we introduce DeepBranchTracer, a novel method that learns both external image features and internal geometric characteristics to reconstruct curvilinear structures. Firstly, we formulate the curvilinear structures extraction as a geometric attribute estimation problem. Then, a curvilinear structure feature learning network is designed to extract essential branch attributes, including the image features of centerline and boundary, and the geometric features of direction and radius. Finally, utilizing a multi-feature fusion tracing strategy, our model iteratively traces the entire branch by integrating the extracted image and geometric features. We extensively evaluated our model on both 2D and 3D datasets, demonstrating its superior performance over existing segmentation and reconstruction methods in terms of accuracy and continuity.

Pyramid Feature Attention Network for Saliency detection

Saliency detection is one of the basic challenges in computer vision. How to extract effective features is a critical point for saliency detection. Recent methods mainly adopt integrating multi-scale convolutional features indiscriminately. However, not all features are useful for saliency detection and some even cause interferences. To solve this problem, we propose Pyramid Feature Attention network to focus on effective high-level context features and low-level spatial structural features. First, we design Context-aware Pyramid Feature Extraction (CPFE) module for multi-scale high-level feature maps to capture rich context features. Second, we adopt channel-wise attention (CA) after CPFE feature maps and spatial attention (SA) after low-level feature maps, then fuse outputs of CA & SA together. Finally, we propose an edge preservation loss to guide network to learn more detailed information in boundary localization. Extensive evaluations on five benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches under different evaluation metrics.

Automatic Neuron Type Identification by Neurite Localization in the Drosophila Medulla

Mapping the connectivity of neurons in the brain (i.e., connectomics) is a challenging problem due to both the number of connections in even the smallest organisms and the nanometer resolution required to resolve them. Because of this, previous connectomes contain only hundreds of neurons, such as in the C.elegans connectome. Recent technological advances will unlock the mysteries of increasingly large connectomes (or partial connectomes). However, the value of these maps is limited by our ability to reason with this data and understand any underlying motifs. To aid connectome analysis, we introduce algorithms to cluster similarly-shaped neurons, where 3D neuronal shapes are represented as skeletons. In particular, we propose a novel location-sensitive clustering algorithm. We show clustering results on neurons reconstructed from the Drosophila medulla that show high-accuracy.