Annotation by Clicks: A Point-Supervised Contrastive Variance Method for Medical Semantic Segmentation


Qing En (Carleton University), Yuhong Guo (Carleton University)
The 35th British Machine Vision Conference
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Abstract

Medical image segmentation methods typically rely on numerous densely annotated images for model training, which are notoriously expensive and time-consuming to collect. To alleviate this burden, weakly supervised techniques have been exploited to train segmentation models with less expensive annotations. In this paper, we propose a novel point-supervised contrastive variance method (PSCV) for medical image semantic segmentation, which only requires one pixel-point from each organ category to be annotated. The proposed method trains the base segmentation network by using a novel contrastive variance (CV) loss to exploit the unlabeled pixels and a partial cross-entropy loss on the labeled pixels. The CV loss function is designed to exploit the statistical spatial distribution properties of organs in medical images and their variance distribution map representations to enforce discriminative predictions over the unlabeled pixels. Experimental results on two standard medical image datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art weakly supervised methods on point-supervised medical image semantic segmentation tasks.

Citation

@inproceedings{En_2024_BMVC,
author    = {Qing En and Yuhong Guo},
title     = {Annotation by Clicks: A Point-Supervised Contrastive Variance Method for Medical Semantic Segmentation},
booktitle = {35th British Machine Vision Conference 2024, {BMVC} 2024, Glasgow, UK, November 25-28, 2024},
publisher = {BMVA},
year      = {2024},
url       = {https://papers.bmvc2024.org/0319.pdf}
}


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