Interactive image segmentation based on samples reconstruction and FLDA

Semi-automated segmentation or more commonly known as interactive image segmentation is an algorithm that extracts a region of interest (ROI) from an image based on the input information from the user. The said algorithm will be repetitively fed with such input information until required region of interest is successfully segmented. To accelerate this segmentation procedure as well as enhancing the result, pre-processing steps can be applied. The application of superpixel is an example of such pre-processing step. Superpixel can be defined as a collection of pixels that share common features such as texture and colours. Though employed as pre-processing step in many interactive segmentation algorithms, to date, no study has been conducted to assess the effects of such incorporations on the segmentation algorithms. Thus, this study aims to address this issue. In this study, five different types of superpixels ranging from watershed, density, graph, clustering and energy optimization categories are evaluated. The superpixels generated by these five algorithms will be used on two interactive image segmentation algorithms: i) Maximal Similarity based Region Merging (MSRM) and ii) Graph-Based Manifold Ranking (GBMR) with single and multiple strokes on various images from the Berkeley image dataset. The result of testing had shown that MSRM achieved better result compared to GBMR in both single and multiple input strokes using SEEDS superpixel algorithm. This study summary concluded that at different superpixel algorithms produced different results and that it is not possible to single out one particular superpixel algorithm that can work well for all the interactive segmentation algorithms. As such, the key to achieving a decent segmentation result lies in choosing the right superpixel algorithms for a given interactive segmentation algorithm.

Interactive segmentation methods utilize user-provided positive and negative clicks to guide the model in accurately segmenting target objects. Compared to fully automatic medical image segmentation, these methods can achieve higher segmentation accuracy with limited image data, demonstrating significant potential in clinical applications. Typically, for each new click provided by the user, conventional interactive segmentation methods reprocess the entire network by re-inputting the click into the segmentation model, which greatly increases the user’s interaction burden and deviates from the intended goal of interactive segmentation tasks. To address this issue, we propose an efficient segmentation network, ESM-Net, for interactive medical image segmentation. It obtains high-quality segmentation masks based on the user’s initial clicks, reducing the complexity of subsequent refinement steps. Recent studies have demonstrated the strong performance of the Mamba model in various vision tasks; however, its application in interactive segmentation remains unexplored. In our study, we incorporate the Mamba module into our framework for the first time and enhance its spatial representation capabilities by developing a Spatial Augmented Convolution (SAC) module. These components are combined as the fundamental building blocks of our network. Furthermore, we designed a novel and efficient segmentation head to fuse multi-scale features extracted from the encoder, optimizing the generation of the predicted segmentation masks. Through comprehensive experiments, our method achieved state-of-the-art performance on three medical image datasets. Specifically, we achieved 1.43 NoC@90 on the Kvasir-SEG dataset, 1.57 NoC@90 on the CVC-ClinicDB polyp segmentation dataset, and 1.03 NoC@90 on the ADAM retinal disk segmentation dataset. The assessments on these three medical image datasets highlight the effectiveness of our approach in interactive medical image segmentation.

Interactive image segmentation is a challenging task and receives increasing attention recently; however, two major drawbacks exist in interactive segmentation approaches. First, the segmentation performance of region of interest (ROI)-based methods is sensitive to the initial ROI: different ROIs may produce results with great difference. Second, most seed-based methods need intense interactions, and are not applicable in many cases. In this paper, we generalize the neutro-connectedness (NC) to be independent of top-down priors of objects and to model image topology with indeterminacy measurement on image regions, propose a novel method for determining object and background regions, which is applied to exclude isolated background regions and enforce label consistency, and put forward a hybrid interactive segmentation method, NC Cut (NC-Cut), which can overcome the above two problems by utilizing both pixelwise appearance information and region-based NC properties. We evaluate the proposed NC-Cut by employing two image data sets (265 images), and demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art interactive image segmentation methods (Grabcut, MILCut, One-Cut, MGCmaxsum, and pPBC).

Extensive research has been conducted in an effort to evaluate methods and techniques for image segmentation. However, while most literature has focused on evaluating automatic and semi-automatic algorithms, works evaluating interactive segmentation algorithms are less numerous. Note that interactive segmentation can improve results by adding prior knowledge from users into the process. Although this user guidance improves segmentation results, it also makes difficult to conduct objective evaluations. For this reason, some works only present non-canonical evaluations. In this paper, we present an objective and empirical evaluation of seed-based interactive segmentation algorithms. We first compare popular metrics that are employed in image-segmentation evaluations in order to define which one reflects most accurately the performance of segmentation algorithms. Then, in the aim of presenting reproducible results, we introduce a novel seed-based user input dataset that extends the well-known GrabCut dataset. In addition, we evaluate and contrast four state-of-the-art interactive segmentation algorithms. The analysis of the results demonstrates that Jaccard coefficient and Precision-Recall curves provide a good insight into the performance of the evaluated algorithms. Finally, the GrabCut algorithm presents the most robust and useful segmentation among all the evaluated algorithms.

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are the backbone of most modern interactive segmentation algorithms. However, the limited receptive field of CNNs restricts their ability to capture long-range semantic relationships. Recently, transformers have gained significant attention for their capacity to capture long-range dependencies. Nevertheless, CNNs still outperform Transformer in extracting local information. An effective interactive segmentation algorithm should accurately capture fine-grained local details alongside global semantic relationships. Therefore, we propose GLClick, a global–local click-based interactive image segmentation model that integrates local and global information through a novel fusion mechanism. We design an efficient global–local feature fusion module (GLFM) that integrates fine-grained features from various layers of ResNet50 with those from the Transformer feature pyramid. This approach maintains ResNet50’s ability to extract local features while effectively leveraging the Transformer to capture global context. Additionally, we enhance the multi-layer perceptron (MLP) to improve performance. Extensive experiments on diverse benchmark datasets demonstrate significant improvements in interactive image segmentation, confirming the effectiveness of our approach. Moreover, we conduct experiments on medical image datasets, further illustrating the model’s versatility and effectiveness across different domains.

This study investigates the impact of image complexity on the accuracy of interactive image segmentation algorithms. Image complexity plays a crucial role in segmentation performance, yet previous studies have primarily relied on subjective methods, leaving a gap in understanding how objective measures impact accuracy. The purpose of this research is to explore the relationship between image complexity and segmentation performance and to propose an adaptive approach for improving accuracy based on complexity measures. The study utilizes objective measures, namely entropy and fractal dimension, to quantify image complexity. An interactive image segmentation algorithm is employed, with a bounding box as the background and strokes as the foreground annotations. The number of strokes is dynamically adjusted based on complexity measures, ensuring a tailored segmentation approach. Comparative evaluations are conducted to assess the effectiveness of dynamic and fixed stroke allocation strategies. The principal results reveal a significant influence of image complexity on segmentation accuracy. The dynamic stroke allocation strategy outperforms fixed allocation, highlighting the importance of adapting to complexity. Moreover, the optimal combination of strokes and superpixel sizes is explored, providing valuable insights for practitioners. The findings emphasize the need to consider image complexity in segmentation algorithms to achieve accurate results. In conclusion, this study contributes to the understanding of the relationship between image complexity and interactive image segmentation. By introducing a dynamic stroke allocation approach and evaluating different configurations, the research provides insights into optimizing accuracy based on image complexity. The adaptive strategy improves segmentation performance and guides the development of robust algorithms. Future research can further refine the adaptive approach, explore additional complexity measures, and incorporate advanced machine learning techniques to enhance interactive image segmentation. Overall, this study advances the field by highlighting the importance of image complexity, providing guidance for practitioners, and paving the way for more efficient segmentation algorithms.

Introduction: Wound segmentation is a pivotal process of photography, which is an important and prevalent method for skin wound analysis and documentation in forensic science. However, due to the complexity and diversity of forensic wound images, no automatic segmentation algorithm is capable of judging the boundaries of the wound accurately. Meanwhile, the currently approach using lasso tool, though accurate, is time-consuming and labor-intensive for practical application. Materials and Methods: In this paper, interactive segmentation algorithms are applied to skin wound extraction. This application improves the performance of traditional segmentation methods and reduces the time of manual method. In order to verify the segmentation, a software platform hosting image preprocessing, image segmentation and wound area calculation is developed. This platform integrates the manual method and three interactive segmentation methods, and is completely available for forensic wound measurement based on photography technique. Results: The segmentation accuracy is evaluated by precision, recall and F-measure, which are higher than 0.96, 0.95, and 0.96 respectively. The error of the area calculation is less than 5%, with respect to the golden standard. Discussion: These results demonstrate that interactive segmentation is practicable and precise enough to meet the demands of skin wounds measurement based on photography in forensic medicine.KeywordsInteractive segmentationWound measurementForensic medicinePhotography

We propose an interactive object segmentation method which learns feature-specific segmentation parameters based on a single image. The first step is to design discriminative features for each pixel, which integrate four kinds of cues, i.e, the color Gaussian mixture model (GMM), the graph learning-based attribute, the texture GMM, and the geodesic distance. Then we formulate the segmentation problem as a conditional random field model in terms of fusing multiple features. While an image-specific parameter setting is practical in interactive segmentation, the efficiency of learning process highly depends on the type of user interaction and the designed features. We propose a feature-specific parameter learning strategy to learn model parameters, in which an offline training stage is not required and parameters are computed according to some sparsely labeled pixels on the basis of a single image. Extensive experiments show that the proposed segmentation model performs well for segmenting images with a weak boundary, texture, or cluttered background. Comparative experiment results demonstrate that our method can achieve both qualitative and quantitative improvements over other state-of-the-art interactive segmentation methods.

Deep learning-based segmentation algorithms for medical image require massive training datasets with accurate annotations, which is costly since it takes much human effort to manually labeling from scratch. Therefore, interactive image segmentation is important and may greatly improve the efficiency and accuracy of medical image labeling. Some interactive segmentation methods (e.g. Deep Extreme Cut and Deepgrow) may improve the labeling through minimal interactive input. However these methods only utilize the initial manually input information, while existing segmentation results (such as annotations produced by nonprofessionals or conventional segmentation algorithms) cannot be utilized. In this paper, an interactive segmentation method is proposed to make use of both existing segmentation results and human interactive information to optimize the segmentation results progressively. In this framework, the user only needs to click on the foreground or background of the target individual on the medical image, the algorithm could adaptively learn the correlation between them, and automatically completes the segmentation of the target. The main contributions of this paper are: (1) We adjusted and applied a convolutional neural network which takes medical image data and user's clicks information as input to achieve more accurate segmentation of medical images. (2) We designed an iterative training strategy to realize the applicability of the model to deal with different number of clicks data input. (3) We designed an algorithm based on false positive and false negative regions to simulate the user's clicks, so as to provide enough training data. By applying the proposed method, users can easily extract the region of interest or modify the segmentation results by multiple clicks. The experimental results of 6 medical image segmentation tasks show that the proposed method achieves more accurate segmentation results by at most five clicks.

In material science and bio-medical domains the quantity and quality of microscopy images is rapidly increasing and there is a great need to automatically detect, delineate and quantify particles, grains, cells, neurons and other functional objects within these images. These are challenging problems for image processing because of the variability in object appearance that inevitably arises in real world image acquisition and analysis. One of the most promising (and practical) ways to address these challenges is interactive image segmentation. These algorithms are designed to incorporate input from a human operator to tailor the segmentation method to the image at hand. Interactive image segmentation is now a key tool in a wide range of applications in microscopy and elsewhere. Historically, interactive image segmentation algorithms have tailored segmentation on an image-by-image basis, and information derived from operator input is not transferred between images. But recently there has been increasing interest to use machine learning in segmentation to provide interactive tools that accumulate and learn from the operator input over longer periods of time. These new learning algorithms reduce the need for operator input over time, and can potentially provide a more dynamic balance between customization and automation for different applications. This paper reviews the state of the art in this area, provides a unified view of these algorithms, and compares the segmentation performance of various design choices.

Many medical image analysis systems require segmentation of the structures of interest as a first step. For scans with gross pathology, automatic segmentation methods may fail. The authors' aim is to develop a versatile, fast, and reliable interactive system to segment anatomical structures. In this study, this system was used for segmenting lungs in challenging thoracic computed tomography (CT) scans. In volumetric thoracic CT scans, the chest is segmented and divided into 3D volumes of interest (VOIs), containing voxels with similar densities. These VOIs are automatically labeled as either lung tissue or nonlung tissue. The automatic labeling results can be corrected using an interactive or a supervised interactive approach. When using the supervised interactive system, the user is shown the classification results per slice, whereupon he/she can adjust incorrect labels. The system is retrained continuously, taking the corrections and approvals of the user into account. In this way, the system learns to make a better distinction between lung tissue and nonlung tissue. When using the interactive framework without supervised learning, the user corrects all incorrectly labeled VOIs manually. Both interactive segmentation tools were tested on 32 volumetric CT scans of pigs, mice and humans, containing pulmonary abnormalities. On average, supervised interactive lung segmentation took under 9 min of user interaction. Algorithm computing time was 2 min on average, but can easily be reduced. On average, 2.0% of all VOIs in a scan had to be relabeled. Lung segmentation using the interactive segmentation method took on average 13 min and involved relabeling 3.0% of all VOIs on average. The resulting segmentations correspond well to manual delineations of eight axial slices per scan, with an average Dice similarity coefficient of 0.933. The authors have developed two fast and reliable methods for interactive lung segmentation in challenging chest CT images. Both systems do not require prior knowledge of the scans under consideration and work on a variety of scans.

Interactive Image Segmentation has attracted much attention in the vision and graphics community recently. A typical application for interactive image segmentation is foreground/background segmentation based on user specified brush labellings. The problem can be formulated within the binary Markov Random Field (MRF) framework which can be solved efficiently via graph cut [1]. However, no attempt has yet been made to handle segmentation of multiple regions using graph cuts. In this paper, we propose a multiclass interactive image segmentation algorithm based on the Potts MRF model. Following [2], this can be converted to a multiway cut problem first proposed in [2] and solved by expansion-move algorithms for approximate inference [2]. A faster algorithm is proposed in this paper for efficient solution of the multiway cut problem based on partial optimal labeling. To achieve this, we combine the one-vs-all classifier fusion framework with the expansion-move algorithm for label inference over large images. We justify our approach with both theoretical analysis and experimental validation.

Nuclear forensics relies on different signatures to identify the source of nuclear material. Such signatures include crystalline structure, chemical composition, and particle morphology. One way to quantify morphology in electron microscope imagery is through image segmentation, where pixels are assigned to several partitions (or groups) that correspond to particles, grains, and other objects of interest within the image. Once pixels are assigned to segments, it is relatively straightforward to quantify other quantities of interest, such as grain size, circularity, etc. However, the range and diversity of microscope images make it difficult to obtain an accurate segmentation automatically. The accuracy of segmentation can be improved through supervised learning, but this requires many images to be manually segmented. Another way to improve the accuracy is to use interactive segmentation. Interactive segmentation requires a human to provide image-specific user input to improve performance. However, the amount of user input (effort) is generally far less than is required for supervised learning. In this paper, we investigate several parallelization strategies to automatically explore the user input parameter space of interactive segmentation algorithms across a large number of images. Specifically, we investigate four different parallelization mechanisms in a high-performance computing (HPC) environment and use the Amdahl fraction to evaluate efficiency on multiple processor cores across multiple nodes. Ultimately, the parallelization strategy that was most efficient utilized the message passing interface integrated with the segmentation and quantification code. This strategy had an Amdahl fraction of 0.985 and a performance of about 0.251 s/image. These results indicate that the parameter space of interactive segmentation algorithms can be efficiently explored using HPC. This opens the door to future work where user input is reduced and where interactive image segmentation algorithms are automatically applied to large image sets.

Interactive segmentation has recently been explored to effectively and efficiently harvest high-quality segmentation masks by iteratively incorporating user hints. While iterative in nature, most existing interactive segmentation methods tend to ignore the dynamics of successive interactions and take each interaction independently. We here propose to model iterative interactive image segmentation with a Markov decision process (MDP) and solve it with reinforcement learning (RL) where each voxel is treated as an agent. Considering the large exploration space for voxel-wise prediction and the dependence among neighboring voxels for the segmentation tasks, multi-agent reinforcement learning is adopted, where the voxel-level policy is shared among agents. Considering that boundary voxels are more important for segmentation, we further introduce a boundary-aware reward, which consists of a global reward in the form of relative cross-entropy gain, to update the policy in a constrained direction, and a boundary reward in the form of relative weight, to emphasize the correctness of boundary predictions. To combine the advantages of different types of interactions, i. e., simple and efficient for point-clicking, and stable and robust for scribbles, we propose a supervoxel-clicking based interaction design. Experimental results on four benchmark datasets have shown that the proposed method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-arts, with the advantage of fewer interactions, higher accuracy, and enhanced robustness.

One of the most important goals in image segmentation is the process of separating the object parts from the image background. Image segmentation is also a fundamental stage in the development of other image applications such as object recognition, target tracking, computer vision, and biomedical image processing. Interactive image segmentation methods with additional user interaction are still popular in research. Interactive image segmentation aims to provide additional information through simple interactions, especially in images with complex objects. Interactive image segmentation with region merging processes has drawbacks, one of which is suboptimal region splitting due to soft color shades, blurred contours, and uneven lighting, referred to in this study as ambiguous regions. However, in the fuzzy region initialization stage after obtaining values from the marker process, there is a possibility of missing or suboptimal determination of fuzzy regions. This is because it only takes the highest gray level value for the background marker and the lowest gray level value for the object marker. In this study, fuzzy region merging using hierarchical clustering is proposed to find optimal initialization for fuzzy regions in image segmentation. Based on the experimental results, the proposed method can achieve optimal segmentation with an average misclassification error value of 2.62% for Natural Images and 9.33% for Dental Images.