The semantic image segmentation task consists of classifying each pixel of an image into an instance, where each instance corresponds to a class. This task is a part of the concept of scene understanding or better explaining the global context of an image. In the medical image analysis domain, image segmentation can be used for image-guided interventions, radiotherapy, or improved radiological diagnostics. In this review, we categorize the leading deep learning-based medical and non-medical image segmentation solutions into six main groups of deep architectural, data synthesis-based, loss function-based, sequenced models, weakly supervised, and multi-task methods and provide a comprehensive review of the contributions in each of these groups. Further, for each group, we analyze each variant of these groups and discuss the limitations of the current approaches and present potential future research directions for semantic image segmentation.

The semantic segmentation of skin lesions is an important and common initial task in the computer aided diagnosis of dermoscopic images. Although deep learning-based approaches have considerably improved the segmentation accuracy, there is still room for improvement by addressing the major challenges, such as variations in lesion shape, size, color and varying levels of contrast. In this work, we propose the first deep semantic segmentation framework for dermoscopic images which incorporates, along with the original RGB images, information extracted using the physics of skin illumination and imaging. In particular, we incorporate information from specific color bands, illumination invariant grayscale images, and shading-attenuated images. We evaluate our method on three datasets: the ISBI ISIC 2017 Skin Lesion Segmentation Challenge dataset, the DermoFit Image Library, and the PH2 dataset and observe improvements of 12.02%, 4.30%, and 8.86% respectively in the mean Jaccard index over a baseline model trained only with RGB images.

Primary brain tumors including gliomas continue to pose significant management challenges to clinicians. While the presentation, the pathology, and the clinical course of these lesions are variable, the initial investigations are usually similar. Patients who are suspected to have a brain tumor will be assessed with computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The imaging findings are used by neurosurgeons to determine the feasibility of surgical resection and plan such an undertaking. Imaging studies are also an indispensable tool in tracking tumor progression or its response to treatment. As these imaging studies are non-invasive, relatively cheap and accessible to patients, there have been many efforts over the past two decades to increase the amount of clinically-relevant information that can be extracted from brain imaging. Most recently, artificial intelligence (AI) techniques have been employed to segment and characterize brain tumors, as well as to detect progression or treatment-response. However, the clinical utility of such endeavours remains limited due to challenges in data collection and annotation, model training, and the reliability of AI-generated information.
We provide a review of recent advances in addressing the above challenges. First, to overcome the challenge of data paucity, different image imputation and synthesis techniques along with annotation collection efforts are summarized. Next, various training strategies are presented to meet multiple desiderata, such as model performance, generalization ability, data privacy protection, and learning with sparse annotations. Finally, standardized performance evaluation and model interpretability methods have been reviewed. We believe that these technical approaches will facilitate the development of a fully-functional AI tool in the clinical care of patients with gliomas.

Over-parameterized deep models usually over-fit to a given training distribution, which makes them sensitive to small changes and out-of-distribution samples at inference time, leading to low generalization performance. To this end, several model-based and randomized data-dependent regularization methods are applied, such as data augmentation, which prevent a model from memorizing the training distribution. Instead of the random transformation of the input images, we propose SIGN, a new regularization method, which modifies the input variables using a linear transformation by estimating each variable's contribution to the final prediction. Our proposed technique maps the input data to a new manifold where the less important variables are de-emphasized. To test the effectiveness of the proposed idea and compare it with other competing methods, we design several test scenarios, such as classification performance, uncertainty, out-of-distribution, and robustness analyses. We compare the methods using three different datasets and four models. We find that SIGN encourages more compact class representations, which results in the model's robustness to random corruptions and out-of-distribution samples while also simultaneously achieving superior performance on normal data compared to other competing methods. Our experiments also demonstrate the successful transferability of the SIGN samples from one model to another.

Skin lesion segmentation is a vital task in skin cancer diagnosis and further treatment. Although deep learning based approaches have significantly improved the segmentation accuracy, these algorithms are still reliant on having a large enough dataset in order to achieve adequate results. Inspired by the immense success of generative adversarial networks (GANs), we propose a GAN-based augmentation of the original dataset in order to improve the segmentation performance. In particular, we use the segmentation masks available in the training dataset to train the Mask2Lesion model, and use the model to generate new lesion images given any arbitrary mask, which are then used to augment the original training dataset. We test Mask2Lesion augmentation on the ISBI ISIC 2017 Skin Lesion Segmentation Challenge dataset and achieve an improvement of 5.17% in the mean Dice score as compared to a model trained with only classical data augmentation techniques.

Although numerous improvements have been made in the field of image segmentation using convolutional neural networks, the majority of these improvements rely on training with larger datasets, model architecture modifications, novel loss functions, and better optimizers. In this paper, we propose a new segmentation performance boosting paradigm that relies on optimally modifying the network's input instead of the network itself. In particular, we leverage the gradients of a trained segmentation network with respect to the input to transfer it to a space where the segmentation accuracy improves. We test the proposed method on three publicly available medical image segmentation datasets: the ISIC 2017 Skin Lesion Segmentation dataset, the Shenzhen Chest X-Ray dataset, and the CVC-ColonDB dataset, for which our method achieves improvements of 5.8%, 0.5%, and 4.8% in the average Dice scores, respectively.

Cloud segmentation is a vital task in applications that utilize satellite imagery. A common obstacle in using deep learning-based methods for this task is the lack of a large number of images with their annotated ground truths. This work presents a content-aware unpaired image-to-image translation algorithm. It generates synthetic images with different land cover types from original images, while it preserves the locations and the intensity values of the cloud pixels. Therefore, no manual annotation of ground truth in these images is required. The visual and numerical evaluations of the generated images by the proposed method prove that their quality is better than that of competitive algorithms.

The linear and non-flexible nature of deep convolutional models makes them vulnerable to carefully crafted adversarial perturbations. To tackle this problem, we propose a non-linear radial basis convolutional feature mapping by learning a Mahalanobis-like distance function. Our method then maps the convolutional features onto a linearly well-separated manifold, which prevents small adversarial perturbations from forcing a sample to cross the decision boundary. We test the proposed method on three publicly available image classification and segmentation datasets namely, MNIST, ISBI ISIC 2017 skin lesion segmentation, and NIH Chest X-Ray-14. We evaluate the robustness of our method to different gradient (targeted and untargeted) and non-gradient based attacks and compare it to several non-gradient masking defense strategies. Our results demonstrate that the proposed method can increase the resilience of deep convolutional neural networks to adversarial perturbations without accuracy drop on clean data.

Over the past few years, there has been an astounding growth in the number of news channels as well as the amount of broadcast news video data. As a result, it is imperative that automated methods need to be developed in order to effectively summarize and store this voluminous data. Format detection of news videos plays an important role in news video analysis. Our problem involves building a robust and versatile news format detector, which identifies the different band elements in a news frame. Probabilistic progressive Hough transform has been used for the detection of band edges. The detected bands are classified as natural images, computer generated graphics (non-text) and text bands. A contrast based text detector has been used to identify the text regions from news frames. Two classifers have been trained and evaluated for the labeling of the detected bands as natural or artificial - Support Vector Machine (SVM) Classifer with RBF kernel, and Extreme Learning Machine (ELM) classifier. The classifiers have been trained on a dataset of 6000 images (3000 images of each class). The ELM classifier reports a balanced accuracy of 77.38%, while the SVM classifier outperforms it with a balanced accuracy of 96.5% using 10-fold cross-validation. The detected bands which have been fragmented due to the presence of gradients in the image have been merged using a three-tier hierarchical reasoning model. The bands were detected with a Jaccard Index of 0.8138, when compared to manually marked ground truth data. We have also presented an extensive literature review of previous work done towards news videos format detection, element band classification, and associative reasoning.

Fingerprint based biometric systems are ubiquitous because they are relatively cheaper to install and maintain, while serving as a fairly accurate biometric trait. However, it has been shown in the past that spoofing attacks on many fingerprint scanners are possible using artificial fingerprints generated using, but not limited to gelatin, Play-Doh and Silicone molds. In this paper, we propose a novel method based on the minutiae count for detecting the fake fingerprints generated using these methods. The proposed algorithm has been tested on the standard FVC (Fingerprint Verification Competition) 2000-2006 dataset and the accuracy was reported to be well above 85%. We also present a literature survey of the previous algorithms for fake fingerprint detection.

This paper proposes a low cost method for the estimation of blood parameters using photo-plethysmography (PPG) technique. Data is obtained non-invasively from the fingertip, which is processed to estimate the heart rate and the hemoglobin concentration. The signal received from fingertip is first processed via analog filters and the output is sent to a computer through a microcontroller interface to be processed using MATLAB in order to estimate the parameters. The proposed method can be used for health monitoring purposes in rural areas. Furthermore, this solution could be ported to work on a standalone device, thus eliminating the need for a computer.

Home pregnancy kits typically provide a qualitative (yes/no) result based on the concentration of human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) present in urine samples. We present an algorithm that converts this purely qualitative test into a semiquantitative one by processing digital images of the test kit's output. The algorithm identifies the test and control lines in the image and classifies an input into one of four different hCG concentration levels based on the color of the test line. The proposed algorithm provides significant improvement over a prior method and reduces the maximum false positive rate to less than 5%. This improvement is achieved by a careful choice of the color space so as to maximize the inter-concentration separability. Also, the proposed method increases the utility of the test kits by providing useful diagnostic information. Furthermore, the algorithm could be ported to a mobile platform to make it particularly helpful in remote rural health monitoring.