IRIS: Interactive Responsive Intelligent Segmentation for 3D Affordance Analysis

Recent advancements in large language and vision-language models have significantly enhanced multimodal understanding, yet translating high-level linguistic instructions into precise robotic actions in 3D space remains challenging. This paper introduces IRIS (Interactive Responsive Intelligent Segmentation), a novel training-free multimodal system for 3D affordance segmentation, alongside a benchmark for evaluating interactive language-guided affordance in everyday environments. IRIS integrates a large multimodal model with a specialized 3D vision network, enabling seamless fusion of 2D and 3D visual understanding with language comprehension. To facilitate evaluation, we present a dataset of 10 typical indoor environments, each with 50 images annotated for object actions and 3D affordance segmentation. Extensive experiments demonstrate IRIS's capability in handling interactive 3D affordance segmentation tasks across diverse settings, showcasing competitive performance across various metrics. Our results highlight IRIS's potential for enhancing human-robot interaction based on affordance understanding in complex indoor environments, advancing the development of more intuitive and efficient robotic systems for real-world applications.

Robust Iris Centre Localisation for Assistive Eye-Gaze Tracking

In this research work, we address the problem of robust iris centre localisation in unconstrained conditions as a core component of our eye-gaze tracking platform. We investigate the application of U-Net variants for segmentation-based and regression-based approaches to improve our iris centre localisation, which was previously based on Bayes' classification. The achieved results are comparable to or better than the state-of-the-art, offering a drastic improvement over those achieved by the Bayes' classifier, and without sacrificing the real-time performance of our eye-gaze tracking platform.

CondSeg: Ellipse Estimation of Pupil and Iris via Conditioned Segmentation

Parsing of eye components (i.e. pupil, iris and sclera) is fundamental for eye tracking and gaze estimation for AR/VR products. Mainstream approaches tackle this problem as a multi-class segmentation task, providing only visible part of pupil/iris, other methods regress elliptical parameters using human-annotated full pupil/iris parameters. In this paper, we consider two priors: projected full pupil/iris circle can be modelled with ellipses (ellipse prior), and the visibility of pupil/iris is controlled by openness of eye-region (condition prior), and design a novel method CondSeg to estimate elliptical parameters of pupil/iris directly from segmentation labels, without explicitly annotating full ellipses, and use eye-region mask to control the visibility of estimated pupil/iris ellipses. Conditioned segmentation loss is used to optimize the parameters by transforming parameterized ellipses into pixel-wise soft masks in a differentiable way. Our method is tested on public datasets (OpenEDS-2019/-2020) and shows competitive results on segmentation metrics, and provides accurate elliptical parameters for further applications of eye tracking simultaneously.

Topology and Intersection-Union Constrained Loss Function for Multi-Region Anatomical Segmentation in Ocular Images

Ocular Myasthenia Gravis (OMG) is a rare and challenging disease to detect in its early stages, but symptoms often first appear in the eye muscles, such as drooping eyelids and double vision. Ocular images can be used for early diagnosis by segmenting different regions, such as the sclera, iris, and pupil, which allows for the calculation of area ratios to support accurate medical assessments. However, no publicly available dataset and tools currently exist for this purpose. To address this, we propose a new topology and intersection-union constrained loss function (TIU loss) that improves performance using small training datasets. We conducted experiments on a public dataset consisting of 55 subjects and 2,197 images. Our proposed method outperformed two widely used loss functions across three deep learning networks, achieving a mean Dice score of 83.12% [82.47%, 83.81%] with a 95% bootstrap confidence interval. In a low-percentage training scenario (10% of the training data), our approach showed an 8.32% improvement in Dice score compared to the baseline. Additionally, we evaluated the method in a clinical setting with 47 subjects and 501 images, achieving a Dice score of 64.44% [63.22%, 65.62%]. We did observe some bias when applying the model in clinical settings. These results demonstrate that the proposed method is accurate, and our code along with the trained model is publicly available.

Open-Source Periorbital Segmentation Dataset for Ophthalmic Applications

Periorbital segmentation and distance prediction using deep learning allows for the objective quantification of disease state, treatment monitoring, and remote medicine. However, there are currently no reports of segmentation datasets for the purposes of training deep learning models with sub mm accuracy on the regions around the eyes. All images (n=2842) had the iris, sclera, lid, caruncle, and brow segmented by five trained annotators. Here, we validate this dataset through intra and intergrader reliability tests and show the utility of the data in training periorbital segmentation networks. All the annotations are publicly available for free download. Having access to segmentation datasets designed specifically for oculoplastic surgery will permit more rapid development of clinically useful segmentation networks which can be leveraged for periorbital distance prediction and disease classification. In addition to the annotations, we also provide an open-source toolkit for periorbital distance prediction from segmentation masks. The weights of all models have also been open-sourced and are publicly available for use by the community.

Towards Unsupervised Eye-Region Segmentation for Eye Tracking

Finding the eye and parsing out the parts (e.g. pupil and iris) is a key prerequisite for image-based eye tracking, which has become an indispensable module in today's head-mounted VR/AR devices. However, a typical route for training a segmenter requires tedious handlabeling. In this work, we explore an unsupervised way. First, we utilize priors of human eye and extract signals from the image to establish rough clues indicating the eye-region structure. Upon these sparse and noisy clues, a segmentation network is trained to gradually identify the precise area for each part. To achieve accurate parsing of the eye-region, we first leverage the pretrained foundation model Segment Anything (SAM) in an automatic way to refine the eye indications. Then, the learning process is designed in an end-to-end manner following progressive and prior-aware principle. Experiments show that our unsupervised approach can easily achieve 90% (the pupil and iris) and 85% (the whole eye-region) of the performances under supervised learning.

On the Feasibility of Creating Iris Periocular Morphed Images

In the last few years, face morphing has been shown to be a complex challenge for Face Recognition Systems (FRS). Thus, the evaluation of other biometric modalities such as fingerprint, iris, and others must be explored and evaluated to enhance biometric systems. This work proposes an end-to-end framework to produce iris morphs at the image level, creating morphs from Periocular iris images. This framework considers different stages such as pair subject selection, segmentation, morph creation, and a new iris recognition system. In order to create realistic morphed images, two approaches for subject selection are explored: random selection and similar radius size selection. A vulnerability analysis and a Single Morphing Attack Detection algorithm were also explored. The results show that this approach obtained very realistic images that can confuse conventional iris recognition systems.

Iris-SAM: Iris Segmentation Using a Foundational Model

Iris segmentation is a critical component of an iris biometric system and it involves extracting the annular iris region from an ocular image. In this work, we develop a pixel-level iris segmentation model from a foundational model, viz., Segment Anything Model (SAM), that has been successfully used for segmenting arbitrary objects. The primary contribution of this work lies in the integration of different loss functions during the fine-tuning of SAM on ocular images. In particular, the importance of Focal Loss is borne out in the fine-tuning process since it strategically addresses the class imbalance problem (i.e., iris versus non-iris pixels). Experiments on ND-IRIS-0405, CASIA-Iris-Interval-v3, and IIT-Delhi-Iris datasets convey the efficacy of the trained model for the task of iris segmentation. For instance, on the ND-IRIS-0405 dataset, an average segmentation accuracy of 99.58% was achieved, compared to the best baseline performance of 89.75%.

Learning Ordinality in Semantic Segmentation

Semantic segmentation consists of predicting a semantic label for each image pixel. Conventional deep learning models do not take advantage of ordinal relations that might exist in the domain at hand. For example, it is known that the pupil is inside the iris, and the lane markings are inside the road. Such domain knowledge can be employed as constraints to make the model more robust. The current literature on this topic has explored pixel-wise ordinal segmentation methods, which treat each pixel as an independent observation and promote ordinality in its representation. This paper proposes novel spatial ordinal segmentation methods, which take advantage of the structured image space by considering each pixel as an observation dependent on its neighborhood context to also promote ordinal spatial consistency. When evaluated with five biomedical datasets and multiple configurations of autonomous driving datasets, ordinal methods resulted in more ordinally-consistent models, with substantial improvements in ordinal metrics and some increase in the Dice coefficient. It was also shown that the incorporation of ordinal consistency results in models with better generalization abilities.

Normalized Validity Scores for DNNs in Regression based Eye Feature Extraction

We propose an improvement to the landmark validity loss. Landmark detection is widely used in head pose estimation, eyelid shape extraction, as well as pupil and iris segmentation. There are numerous additional applications where landmark detection is used to estimate the shape of complex objects. One part of this process is the accurate and fine-grained detection of the shape. The other part is the validity or inaccuracy per landmark, which can be used to detect unreliable areas, where the shape possibly does not fit, and to improve the accuracy of the entire shape extraction by excluding inaccurate landmarks. We propose a normalization in the loss formulation, which improves the accuracy of the entire approach due to the numerical balance of the normalized inaccuracy. In addition, we propose a margin for the inaccuracy to reduce the impact of gradients, which are produced by negligible errors close to the ground truth.