Jiachen Xu

Tianyuan Yao, Chang Qu, Jun Long et al.

With the rapid development of self-supervised learning (e.g., contrastive learning), the importance of having large-scale images (even without annotations) for training a more generalizable AI model has been widely recognized in medical image analysis. However, collecting large-scale task-specific unannotated data at scale can be challenging for individual labs. Existing online resources, such as digital books, publications, and search engines, provide a new resource for obtaining large-scale images. However, published images in healthcare (e.g., radiology and pathology) consist of a considerable amount of compound figures with subplots. In order to extract and separate compound figures into usable individual images for downstream learning, we propose a simple compound figure separation (SimCFS) framework without using the traditionally required detection bounding box annotations, with a new loss function and a hard case simulation. Our technical contribution is four-fold: (1) we introduce a simulation-based training framework that minimizes the need for resource extensive bounding box annotations; (2) we propose a new side loss that is optimized for compound figure separation; (3) we propose an intra-class image augmentation method to simulate hard cases; and (4) to the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that evaluates the efficacy of leveraging self-supervised learning with compound image separation. From the results, the proposed SimCFS achieved state-of-the-art performance on the ImageCLEF 2016 Compound Figure Separation Database. The pretrained self-supervised learning model using large-scale mined figures improved the accuracy of downstream image classification tasks with a contrastive learning algorithm. The source code of SimCFS is made publicly available at https://github.com/hrlblab/ImageSeperation.

Jiachen Xu, Min Wang, Jingyu Gong et al.

Prior plays an important role in providing the plausible constraint on human motion. Previous works design motion priors following a variety of paradigms under different circumstances, leading to the lack of versatility. In this paper, we first summarize the indispensable properties of the motion prior, and accordingly, design a framework to learn the versatile motion prior, which models the inherent probability distribution of human motions. Specifically, for efficient prior representation learning, we propose a global orientation normalization to remove redundant environment information in the original motion data space. Also, a two-level, sequence-based and segment-based, frequency guidance is introduced into the encoding stage. Then, we adopt a denoising training scheme to disentangle the environment information from input motion data in a learnable way, so as to generate consistent and distinguishable representation. Embedding our motion prior into prevailing backbones on three different tasks, we conduct extensive experiments, and both quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate the versatility and effectiveness of our motion prior. Our model and code are available at https://github.com/JchenXu/human-motion-prior.

Tianyuan Yao, Chang Qu, Quan Liu et al.

Unsupervised learning algorithms (e.g., self-supervised learning, auto-encoder, contrastive learning) allow deep learning models to learn effective image representations from large-scale unlabeled data. In medical image analysis, even unannotated data can be difficult to obtain for individual labs. Fortunately, national-level efforts have been made to provide efficient access to obtain biomedical image data from previous scientific publications. For instance, NIH has launched the Open-i search engine that provides a large-scale image database with free access. However, the images in scientific publications consist of a considerable amount of compound figures with subplots. To extract and curate individual subplots, many different compound figure separation approaches have been developed, especially with the recent advances in deep learning. However, previous approaches typically required resource extensive bounding box annotation to train detection models. In this paper, we propose a simple compound figure separation (SimCFS) framework that uses weak classification annotations from individual images. Our technical contribution is three-fold: (1) we introduce a new side loss that is designed for compound figure separation; (2) we introduce an intra-class image augmentation method to simulate hard cases; (3) the proposed framework enables an efficient deployment to new classes of images, without requiring resource extensive bounding box annotations. From the results, the SimCFS achieved a new state-of-the-art performance on the ImageCLEF 2016 Compound Figure Separation Database. The source code of SimCFS is made publicly available at https://github.com/hrlblab/ImageSeperation.

Jiachen Xu, Junlin Guo, James Zimmer-Dauphinee et al.

Archaeology has long faced fundamental issues of sampling and scalar representation. Traditionally, the local-to-regional-scale views of settlement patterns are produced through systematic pedestrian surveys. Recently, systematic manual survey of satellite and aerial imagery has enabled continuous distributional views of archaeological phenomena at interregional scales. However, such 'brute force' manual imagery survey methods are both time- and labor-intensive, as well as prone to inter-observer differences in sensitivity and specificity. The development of self-supervised learning methods offers a scalable learning scheme for locating archaeological features using unlabeled satellite and historical aerial images. However, archaeological features are generally only visible in a very small proportion relative to the landscape, while the modern contrastive-supervised learning approach typically yields an inferior performance on highly imbalanced datasets. In this work, we propose a framework to address this long-tail problem. As opposed to the existing contrastive learning approaches that treat the labelled and unlabeled data separately, our proposed method reforms the learning paradigm under a semi-supervised setting in order to utilize the precious annotated data (<7% in our setting). Specifically, the highly unbalanced nature of the data is employed as the prior knowledge in order to form pseudo negative pairs by ranking the similarities between unannotated image patches and annotated anchor images. In this study, we used 95,358 unlabeled images and 5,830 labelled images in order to solve the issues associated with detecting ancient buildings from a long-tailed satellite image dataset. From the results, our semi-supervised contrastive learning model achieved a promising testing balanced accuracy of 79.0%, which is a 3.8% improvement as compared to other state-of-the-art approaches.

Jiachen Xu, Jingyu Gong, Jie Zhou et al.

Besides local features, global information plays an essential role in semantic segmentation, while recent works usually fail to explicitly extract the meaningful global information and make full use of it. In this paper, we propose a SceneEncoder module to impose a scene-aware guidance to enhance the effect of global information. The module predicts a scene descriptor, which learns to represent the categories of objects existing in the scene and directly guides the point-level semantic segmentation through filtering out categories not belonging to this scene. Additionally, to alleviate segmentation noise in local region, we design a region similarity loss to propagate distinguishing features to their own neighboring points with the same label, leading to the enhancement of the distinguishing ability of point-wise features. We integrate our methods into several prevailing networks and conduct extensive experiments on benchmark datasets ScanNet and ShapeNet. Results show that our methods greatly improve the performance of baselines and achieve state-of-the-art performance.