Qi Bi

Wei Ji, Jingjing Li, Qi Bi et al.

Recently, Meta AI Research approaches a general, promptable Segment Anything Model (SAM) pre-trained on an unprecedentedly large segmentation dataset (SA-1B). Without a doubt, the emergence of SAM will yield significant benefits for a wide array of practical image segmentation applications. In this study, we conduct a series of intriguing investigations into the performance of SAM across various applications, particularly in the fields of natural images, agriculture, manufacturing, remote sensing, and healthcare. We analyze and discuss the benefits and limitations of SAM, while also presenting an outlook on its future development in segmentation tasks. By doing so, we aim to give a comprehensive understanding of SAM's practical applications. This work is expected to provide insights that facilitate future research activities toward generic segmentation. Source code is publicly available.

Junwen Pan, Qi Bi, Yanzhan Yang et al.

Due to the lack of expertise for medical image annotation, the investigation of label-efficient methodology for medical image segmentation becomes a heated topic. Recent progresses focus on the efficient utilization of weak annotations together with few strongly-annotated labels so as to achieve comparable segmentation performance in many unprofessional scenarios. However, these approaches only concentrate on the supervision inconsistency between strongly- and weakly-annotated instances but ignore the instance inconsistency inside the weakly-annotated instances, which inevitably leads to performance degradation. To address this problem, we propose a novel label-efficient hybrid-supervised framework, which considers each weakly-annotated instance individually and learns its weight guided by the gradient direction of the strongly-annotated instances, so that the high-quality prior in the strongly-annotated instances is better exploited and the weakly-annotated instances are depicted more precisely. Specially, our designed dynamic instance indicator (DII) realizes the above objectives, and is adapted to our dynamic co-regularization (DCR) framework further to alleviate the erroneous accumulation from distortions of weak annotations. Extensive experiments on two hybrid-supervised medical segmentation datasets demonstrate that with only 10% strong labels, the proposed framework can leverage the weak labels efficiently and achieve competitive performance against the 100% strong-label supervised scenario.

Wei Ji, Jingjing Li, Qi Bi et al.

Growing interests in RGB-D salient object detection (RGB-D SOD) have been witnessed in recent years, owing partly to the popularity of depth sensors and the rapid progress of deep learning techniques. Unfortunately, existing RGB-D SOD methods typically demand large quantity of training images being thoroughly annotated at pixel-level. The laborious and time-consuming manual annotation has become a real bottleneck in various practical scenarios. On the other hand, current unsupervised RGB-D SOD methods still heavily rely on handcrafted feature representations. This inspires us to propose in this paper a deep unsupervised RGB-D saliency detection approach, which requires no manual pixel-level annotation during training. It is realized by two key ingredients in our training pipeline. First, a depth-disentangled saliency update (DSU) framework is designed to automatically produce pseudo-labels with iterative follow-up refinements, which provides more trustworthy supervision signals for training the saliency network. Second, an attentive training strategy is introduced to tackle the issue of noisy pseudo-labels, by properly re-weighting to highlight the more reliable pseudo-labels. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior efficiency and effectiveness of our approach in tackling the challenging unsupervised RGB-D SOD scenarios. Moreover, our approach can also be adapted to work in fully-supervised situation. Empirical studies show the incorporation of our approach gives rise to notably performance improvement in existing supervised RGB-D SOD models.

Cheng Bian, Xiaoyu Li, Qi Bi et al.

Arterial blood pressure (ABP) holds substantial promise for proactive cardiovascular health management. Notwithstanding its potential, the invasive nature of ABP measurements confines their utility primarily to clinical environments, limiting their applicability for continuous monitoring beyond medical facilities. The conversion of photoplethysmography (PPG) signals into ABP equivalents has garnered significant attention due to its potential in revolutionizing cardiovascular disease management. Recent strides in PPG-to-ABP prediction encompass the integration of generative and discriminative models. Despite these advances, the efficacy of these models is curtailed by the latent space shift predicament, stemming from alterations in PPG data distribution across disparate hardware and individuals, potentially leading to distorted ABP waveforms. To tackle this problem, we present an innovative solution named the Latent Space Constraint Transformer (LSCT), leveraging a quantized codebook to yield robust latent spaces by employing multiple discretizing bases. To facilitate improved reconstruction, the Correlation-boosted Attention Module (CAM) is introduced to systematically query pertinent bases on a global scale. Furthermore, to enhance expressive capacity, we propose the Multi-Spectrum Enhancement Knowledge (MSEK), which fosters local information flow within the channels of latent code and provides additional embedding for reconstruction. Through comprehensive experimentation on both publicly available datasets and a private downstream task dataset, the proposed approach demonstrates noteworthy performance enhancements compared to existing methods. Extensive ablation studies further substantiate the effectiveness of each introduced module.

Qi Bi, Wei Ji, Jingjun Yi et al.

High-quality annotation of fine-grained visual categories demands great expert knowledge, which is taxing and time consuming. Alternatively, learning fine-grained visual representation from enormous unlabeled images (e.g., species, brands) by self-supervised learning becomes a feasible solution. However, recent researches find that existing self-supervised learning methods are less qualified to represent fine-grained categories. The bottleneck lies in that the pre-text representation is built from every patch-wise embedding, while fine-grained categories are only determined by several key patches of an image. In this paper, we propose a Cross-level Multi-instance Distillation (CMD) framework to tackle the challenge. Our key idea is to consider the importance of each image patch in determining the fine-grained pre-text representation by multiple instance learning. To comprehensively learn the relation between informative patches and fine-grained semantics, the multi-instance knowledge distillation is implemented on both the region/image crop pairs from the teacher and student net, and the region-image crops inside the teacher / student net, which we term as intra-level multi-instance distillation and inter-level multi-instance distillation. Extensive experiments on CUB-200-2011, Stanford Cars and FGVC Aircraft show that the proposed method outperforms the contemporary method by upto 10.14% and existing state-of-the-art self-supervised learning approaches by upto 19.78% on both top-1 accuracy and Rank-1 retrieval metric.