Chaofeng Li

Yaozong Mo, Chaofeng Li, Wenqi Ren et al.

Deep learning-based methods have achieved significant performance for image defogging. However, existing methods are mainly developed for land scenes and perform poorly when dealing with overwater foggy images, since overwater scenes typically contain large expanses of sky and water. In this work, we propose a Prior map Guided CycleGAN (PG-CycleGAN) for defogging of images with overwater scenes. To promote the recovery of the objects on water in the image, two loss functions are exploited for the network where a prior map is designed to invert the dark channel and the min-max normalization is used to suppress the sky and emphasize objects. However, due to the unpaired training set, the network may learn an under-constrained domain mapping from foggy to fog-free image, leading to artifacts and loss of details. Thus, we propose an intuitive Upscaling Inception Module (UIM) and a Long-range Residual Coarse-to-fine framework (LRC) to mitigate this issue. Extensive experiments on qualitative and quantitative comparisons demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art supervised, semi-supervised, and unsupervised defogging approaches.

Haichou Chen, Yishu Deng, Bin Li et al.

Delineating the lesion area is an important task in image-based diagnosis. Pixel-wise classification is a popular approach to segmenting the region of interest. However, at fuzzy boundaries such methods usually result in glitches, discontinuity, or disconnection, inconsistent with the fact that lesions are solid and smooth. To overcome these undesirable artifacts, we propose the BezierSeg model which outputs bezier curves encompassing the region of interest. Directly modelling the contour with analytic equations ensures that the segmentation is connected, continuous, and the boundary is smooth. In addition, it offers sub-pixel accuracy. Without loss of accuracy, the bezier contour can be resampled and overlaid with images of any resolution. Moreover, a doctor can conveniently adjust the curve's control points to refine the result. Our experiments show that the proposed method runs in real time and achieves accuracy competitive with pixel-wise segmentation models.

Yi-Jie Huang, Qi Dou, Zi-Xian Wang et al.

Segmentation of colorectal cancerous regions from 3D Magnetic Resonance (MR) images is a crucial procedure for radiotherapy which conventionally requires accurate delineation of tumour boundaries at an expense of labor, time and reproducibility. While deep learning based methods serve good baselines in 3D image segmentation tasks, small applicable patch size limits effective receptive field and degrades segmentation performance. In addition, Regions of interest (RoIs) localization from large whole volume 3D images serves as a preceding operation that brings about multiple benefits in terms of speed, target completeness, reduction of false positives. Distinct from sliding window or non-joint localization-segmentation based models, we propose a novel multitask framework referred to as 3D RoI-aware U-Net (3D RU-Net), for RoI localization and in-region segmentation where the two tasks share one backbone encoder network. With the region proposals from the encoder, we crop multi-level RoI in-region features from the encoder to form a GPU memory-efficient decoder for detailpreserving segmentation and therefore enlarged applicable volume size and effective receptive field. To effectively train the model, we designed a Dice formulated loss function for the global-to-local multi-task learning procedure. Based on the efficiency gains, we went on to ensemble models with different receptive fields to achieve even higher performance costing minor extra computational expensiveness. Extensive experiments were conducted on 64 cancerous cases with a four-fold cross-validation, and the results showed significant superiority in terms of accuracy and efficiency over conventional frameworks. In conclusion, the proposed method has a huge potential for extension to other 3D object segmentation tasks from medical images due to its inherent generalizability. The code for the proposed method is publicly available.