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Medical image segmentation is the process of anatomically isolating organs for analysis and treatment. Leading works within this domain emerged with the well-known U-Net. Despite its success, recent works have shown the limitations of U-Net to conduct segmentation given image particularities such as noise, corruption or lack of contrast. Prior knowledge integration allows to overcome segmentation ambiguities. This paper introduces BB-UNet (Bounding Box U-Net), a deep learning model that integrates location as well as shape prior onto model training. The proposed model is inspired by U-Net and incorporates priors through a novel convolutional layer introduced at the level of skip connections. The proposed architecture helps in presenting attention kernels onto the neural training in order to guide the model on where to look for the organs. Moreover, it fine-tunes the encoder layers based on positional constraints. The proposed model is exploited within two main paradigms: as a solo model given a fully supervised framework and as an ancillary model, in a weakly supervised setting. In the current experiments, manual bounding boxes are fed at inference and as such BB-Unet is exploited in a semi-automatic setting; however, BB-Unet has the potential of being part of a fully automated process, if it relies on a preliminary step of object detection. To validate the performance of the proposed model, experiments are conducted on two public datasets: the SegTHOR dataset which focuses on the segmentation of thoracic organs at risk in computed tomography (CT) images, and the Cardiac dataset which is a mono-modal MRI dataset released as part of the Decathlon challenge and dedicated to segmentation of the left atrium. Results show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in fully supervised learning frameworks and registers relevant results given the weakly supervised domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • We employed background connectivity with outer boundary for saliency detection. • We used several low level measures to accurately detect the salient object. • We improve initial saliency map results through a multi-features optimization function. • Refinement procedure repairs the lost information and helps in suppressing background. Graphical abstract Abstract Automatic salient object detection from a cluttered image using the object prior information related to the image enhances the accuracy of object detection which is very useful for many computer vision applications. In this work, we introduce a new bottom-up approach for salient object detection by incorporating the multi-features of color contrast with background connectivity weight and color distribution. Firstly, we extract coarse saliency map by using a color contrast with background connectivity weight and the color distribution. Secondly, we improve the coarse saliency map result through a multi-features global optimization energy function. This energy function is used to fuse several low-level measures, to evenly highlight the salient object and suppress the background efficiently. Extensive experiments on the benchmark datasets have been performed to demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms against the existed state-of-the-art methods with the higher values of precision and recall. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Road detection from the perspective of moving vehicles is a challenging issue in autonomous driving. Recently, many deep learning methods spring up for this task, because they can extract high-level local features to find road regions from raw RGB data, such as convolutional neural networks and fully convolutional networks (FCNs). However, how to detect the boundary of road accurately is still an intractable problem. In this paper, we propose siamesed FCNs (named “s-FCN-loc”), which is able to consider RGB-channel images, semantic contours, and location priors simultaneously to segment the road region elaborately. To be specific, the s-FCN-loc has two streams to process the original RGB images and contour maps, respectively. At the same time, the location prior is directly appended to the siamesed FCN to promote the final detection performance. Our contributions are threefold: 1) An s-FCN-loc is proposed that learns more discriminative features of road boundaries than the original FCN to detect more accurate road regions. 2) Location prior is viewed as a type of feature map and directly appended to the final feature map in s-FCN-loc to promote the detection performance effectively, which is easier than other traditional methods, namely, different priors for different inputs (image patches). 3) The convergent speed of training s-FCN-loc model is 30% faster than the original FCN because of the guidance of highly structured contours. The proposed approach is evaluated on the KITTI road detection benchmark and one-class road detection data set, and achieves a competitive result with the state of the arts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, we propose a salient region detection algorithm from the point of view of unique and compact representation of individual image. In first step, the original image is segmented into super-pixels. In second step, the sparse representation measure and uniqueness of the features are computed. Then both are ranked on the basis of the background and foreground seeds respectively. Thirdly, a location prior map is used to enhance the foci of attention. We apply the Bayes procedure to integrate computed results to produce smooth and precise saliency map. We compare our proposed algorithm against the state-of-the-art saliency detection methods using four of the largest widely available standard data-bases, experimental results specify that the proposed algorithm outperforms. We also show that how the saliency map of the proposed method is used to discover outline of object, furthermore using this outline our method produce the saliency cut of the desired object. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Saliency detection has become a valuable tool for many image processing tasks, like image retargeting, object recognition, and adaptive compression. With the rapid development of the saliency detection methods, people have approved the hypothesis that “the appearance contrast between the salient object and the background is high”, and build their saliency methods on some priors that explain this hypothesis. However, these methods are not satisfactory enough. We propose a two-stage salient region detection method. The input image is first segmented into superpixels. In the first stage, two measures which measure the isolation and distribution of each superpixel are proposed, we consider that both of these two measures are important for finding the salient regions, thus the image-feature-based saliency map is obtained by combining the two measures. Then, in the second stage, we incorporate into the image-feature-based saliency map a location prior map to emphasize the foci of attention. In this algorithm, six priors that explain what is the salient region are exploited. The proposed method is compared with the state-of-the-art saliency detection methods using one of the largest publicly available standard databases, the experimental result indicates that the proposed method has better performance. We also demonstrate how the saliency map of the proposed method can be used to create high quality of initial segmentation masks for subsequent image processing, like Grabcut based salient object segmentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]