Amir Livne

Roy Hirsch, Mathilde Caron, Regev Cohen et al.

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has led to important breakthroughs in computer vision by allowing learning from large amounts of unlabeled data. As such, it might have a pivotal role to play in biomedicine where annotating data requires a highly specialized expertise. Yet, there are many healthcare domains for which SSL has not been extensively explored. One such domain is endoscopy, minimally invasive procedures which are commonly used to detect and treat infections, chronic inflammatory diseases or cancer. In this work, we study the use of a leading SSL framework, namely Masked Siamese Networks (MSNs), for endoscopic video analysis such as colonoscopy and laparoscopy. To fully exploit the power of SSL, we create sizable unlabeled endoscopic video datasets for training MSNs. These strong image representations serve as a foundation for secondary training with limited annotated datasets, resulting in state-of-the-art performance in endoscopic benchmarks like surgical phase recognition during laparoscopy and colonoscopic polyp characterization. Additionally, we achieve a 50% reduction in annotated data size without sacrificing performance. Thus, our work provides evidence that SSL can dramatically reduce the need of annotated data in endoscopy.

Yotam Intrator, Natalie Aizenberg, Amir Livne et al.

Computer-aided polyp detection (CADe) is becoming a standard, integral part of any modern colonoscopy system. A typical colonoscopy CADe detects a polyp in a single frame and does not track it through the video sequence. Yet, many downstream tasks including polyp characterization (CADx), quality metrics, automatic reporting, require aggregating polyp data from multiple frames. In this work we propose a robust long term polyp tracking method based on re-identification by visual appearance. Our solution uses an attention-based self-supervised ML model, specifically designed to leverage the temporal nature of video input. We quantitatively evaluate method's performance and demonstrate its value for the CADx task.

Amir Livne, Alex Bronstein, Ron Kimmel et al.

Some face recognition methods are designed to utilize geometric information extracted from depth sensors to overcome the weaknesses of single-image based recognition technologies. However, the accurate acquisition of the depth profile is an expensive and challenging process. Here, we introduce a novel method that learns to recognize faces from stereo camera systems without the need to explicitly compute the facial surface or depth map. The raw face stereo images along with the location in the image from which the face is extracted allow the proposed CNN to improve the recognition task while avoiding the need to explicitly handle the geometric structure of the face. This way, we keep the simplicity and cost efficiency of identity authentication from a single image, while enjoying the benefits of geometric data without explicitly reconstructing it. We demonstrate that the suggested method outperforms both existing single-image and explicit depth based methods on large-scale benchmarks, and even capable of recognize spoofing attacks. We also provide an ablation study that shows that the suggested method uses the face locations in the left and right images to encode informative features that improve the overall performance.