TAGNet: Learning Configurable Context Pathways for Semantic Segmentation.

State-of-the-art semantic segmentation methods capture the relationship between pixels to facilitate contextual information exchange. Advanced methods utilize fixed pathways for context exchange, lacking the flexibility to harness the most relevant context for each pixel. In this paper, we present Configurable Context Pathways (CCPs), a novel model for establishing pathways for augmenting contextual information. In contrast to previous pathway models, CCPs are learned, leveraging configurable regions to form information flows between pairs of pixels. We propose TAGNet to adaptively configure the regions, which span over the entire image space, driven by the relationships between the remote pixels. Subsequently, the information flows along the pathways are updated gradually by the information provided by sequences of configurable regions, forming more powerful contextual information. We extensively evaluate the traveling, adaption, and gathering (TAG) stages of our network on the public benchmarks, demonstrating that all of the stages successfully improve the segmentation accuracy and help to surpass the state-of-the-art results. The code package is available at: https://github.com/dilincv/TAGNet.

The Medical Segmentation Decathlon.

International challenges have become the de facto standard for comparative assessment of image analysis algorithms. Although segmentation is the most widely investigated medical image processing task, the various challenges have been organized to focus only on specific clinical tasks. We organized the Medical Segmentation Decathlon (MSD)-a biomedical image analysis challenge, in which algorithms compete in a multitude of both tasks and modalities to investigate the hypothesis that a method capable of performing well on multiple tasks will generalize well to a previously unseen task and potentially outperform a custom-designed solution. MSD results confirmed this hypothesis, moreover, MSD winner continued generalizing well to a wide range of other clinical problems for the next two years. Three main conclusions can be drawn from this study: (1) state-of-the-art image segmentation algorithms generalize well when retrained on unseen tasks; (2) consistent algorithmic performance across multiple tasks is a strong surrogate of algorithmic generalizability; (3) the training of accurate AI segmentation models is now commoditized to scientists that are not versed in AI model training.

SCN: Switchable Context Network for Semantic Segmentation of RGB-D Images.

Context representations have been widely used to profit semantic image segmentation. The emergence of depth data provides additional information to construct more discriminating context representations. Depth data preserves the geometric relationship of objects in a scene, which is generally hard to be inferred from RGB images. While deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been successful in solving semantic segmentation, we encounter the problem of optimizing CNN training for the informative context using depth data to enhance the segmentation accuracy. In this paper, we present a novel switchable context network (SCN) to facilitate semantic segmentation of RGB-D images. Depth data is used to identify objects existing in multiple image regions. The network analyzes the information in the image regions to identify different characteristics, which are then used selectively through switching network branches. With the content extracted from the inherent image structure, we are able to generate effective context representations that are aware of both image structures and object relationships, leading to a more coherent learning of semantic segmentation network. We demonstrate that our SCN outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two public datasets.