Li Cui

Haifeng Li, Weihong Guo, Jun Liu et al.

Image segmentation is a crucial but challenging task that has many applications. In medical imaging for instance, intensity inhomogeneity and noise are common. In thigh muscle images, different muscles are closed packed together and there are often no clear boundaries between them. Intensity based segmentation models cannot separate one muscle from another. To solve such problems, in this work we present a segmentation model with adaptive spatial priors from joint registration. This model combines segmentation and registration in a unified framework to leverage their positive mutual influence. The segmentation is based on a modified Gaussian mixture model (GMM), which integrates intensity inhomogeneity and spacial smoothness. The registration plays the role of providing a shape prior. We adopt a modified sum of squared difference (SSD) fidelity term and Tikhonov regularity term for registration, and also utilize Gaussian pyramid and parametric method for robustness. The connection between segmentation and registration is guaranteed by the cross entropy metric that aims to make the segmentation map (from segmentation) and deformed atlas (from registration) as similar as possible. This joint framework is implemented within a constraint optimization framework, which leads to an efficient algorithm. We evaluate our proposed model on synthetic and thigh muscle MR images. Numerical results show the improvement as compared to segmentation and registration performed separately and other joint models.

Haifeng Li, Jun Liu, Li Cui et al.

Image segmentation with a volume constraint is an important prior for many real applications. In this work, we present a novel volume preserving image segmentation algorithm, which is based on the framework of entropic regularized optimal transport theory. The classical Total Variation (TV) regularizer and volume preserving are integrated into a regularized optimal transport model, and the volume and classification constraints can be regarded as two measures preserving constraints in the optimal transport problem. By studying the dual problem, we develop a simple and efficient dual algorithm for our model. Moreover, to be different from many variational based image segmentation algorithms, the proposed algorithm can be directly unrolled to a new Volume Preserving and TV regularized softmax (VPTV-softmax) layer for semantic segmentation in the popular Deep Convolution Neural Network (DCNN). The experiment results show that our proposed model is very competitive and can improve the performance of many semantic segmentation nets such as the popular U-net.