Weakly-supervised medical image segmentation is gaining traction as it requires only rough annotations rather than accurate pixel-to-pixel labels, thereby reducing the workload for specialists. Although some progress has been made, there is still a considerable performance gap between the label-efficient methods and fully-supervised one, which can be attributed to the uncertainty nature of these weak labels. To address this issue, we propose a novel weak annotation method coupled with its learning framework EAUWSeg to eliminate the annotation uncertainty. Specifically, we first propose the Bounded Polygon Annotation (BPAnno) by simply labeling two polygons for a lesion. Then, the tailored learning mechanism that explicitly treat bounded polygons as two separated annotations is proposed to learn invariant feature by providing adversarial supervision signal for model training. Subsequently, a confidence-auxiliary consistency learner incorporates with a classification-guided confidence generator is designed to provide reliable supervision signal for pixels in uncertain region by leveraging the feature presentation consistency across pixels within the same category as well as class-specific information encapsulated in bounded polygons annotation. Experimental results demonstrate that EAUWSeg outperforms existing weakly-supervised segmentation methods. Furthermore, compared to fully-supervised counterparts, the proposed method not only delivers superior performance but also costs much less annotation workload. This underscores the superiority and effectiveness of our approach.

In recent years, advanced U-like networks have demonstrated remarkable performance in medical image segmentation tasks. However, their drawbacks, including excessive parameters, high computational complexity, and slow inference speed, pose challenges for practical implementation in scenarios with limited computational resources. Existing lightweight U-like networks have alleviated some of these problems, but they often have pre-designed structures and consist of inseparable modules, limiting their application scenarios. In this paper, we propose three plug-and-play decoders by employing different discretization methods of the neural memory Ordinary Differential Equations (nmODEs). These decoders integrate features at various levels of abstraction by processing information from skip connections and performing numerical operations on upward path. Through experiments on the PH2, ISIC2017, and ISIC2018 datasets, we embed these decoders into different U-like networks, demonstrating their effectiveness in significantly reducing the number of parameters and FLOPs while maintaining performance. In summary, the proposed discretized nmODEs decoders are capable of reducing the number of parameters by about 20% ~ 50% and FLOPs by up to 74%, while possessing the potential to adapt to all U-like networks. Our code is available at https://github.com/nayutayuki/Lightweight-nmODE-Decoders-For-U-like-networks.

Glass largely blurs the boundary between the real world and the reflection. The special transmittance and reflectance quality have confused the semantic tasks related to machine vision. Therefore, how to clear the boundary built by glass, and avoid over-capturing features as false positive information in deep structure, matters for constraining the segmentation of reflection surface and penetrating glass. We proposed the Fourier Boundary Features Network with Wider Catchers (FBWC), which might be the first attempt to utilize sufficiently wide horizontal shallow branches without vertical deepening for guiding the fine granularity segmentation boundary through primary glass semantic information. Specifically, we designed the Wider Coarse-Catchers (WCC) for anchoring large area segmentation and reducing excessive extraction from a structural perspective. We embed fine-grained features by Cross Transpose Attention (CTA), which is introduced to avoid the incomplete area within the boundary caused by reflection noise. For excavating glass features and balancing high-low layers context, a learnable Fourier Convolution Controller (FCC) is proposed to regulate information integration robustly. The proposed method has been validated on three different public glass segmentation datasets. Experimental results reveal that the proposed method yields better segmentation performance compared with the state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods in glass image segmentation.

It is a key to construct a similarity graph in graph-oriented subspace learning and clustering. In a similarity graph, each vertex denotes a data point and the edge weight represents the similarity between two points. There are two popular schemes to construct a similarity graph, i.e., pairwise distance based scheme and linear representation based scheme. Most existing works have only involved one of the above schemes and suffered from some limitations. Specifically, pairwise distance based methods are sensitive to the noises and outliers compared with linear representation based methods. On the other hand, there is the possibility that linear representation based algorithms wrongly select inter-subspaces points to represent a point, which will degrade the performance. In this paper, we propose an algorithm, called Locally Linear Representation (LLR), which integrates pairwise distance with linear representation together to address the problems. The proposed algorithm can automatically encode each data point over a set of points that not only could denote the objective point with less residual error, but also are close to the point in Euclidean space. The experimental results show that our approach is promising in subspace learning and subspace clustering.

In this paper, we recast the subspace clustering as a verification problem. Our idea comes from an assumption that the distribution between a given sample x and cluster centers Omega is invariant to different distance metrics on the manifold, where each distribution is defined as a probability map (i.e. soft-assignment) between x and Omega. To verify this so-called invariance of distribution, we propose a deep learning based subspace clustering method which simultaneously learns a compact representation using a neural network and a clustering assignment by minimizing the discrepancy between pair-wise sample-centers distributions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to reformulate clustering as a verification problem. Moreover, the proposed method is also one of the first several cascade clustering models which jointly learn representation and clustering in end-to-end manner. Extensive experimental results show the effectiveness of our algorithm comparing with 11 state-of-the-art clustering approaches on four data sets regarding to four evaluation metrics.

Under the framework of spectral clustering, the key of subspace clustering is building a similarity graph which describes the neighborhood relations among data points. Some recent works build the graph using sparse, low-rank, and $\ell_2$-norm-based representation, and have achieved state-of-the-art performance. However, these methods have suffered from the following two limitations. First, the time complexities of these methods are at least proportional to the cube of the data size, which make those methods inefficient for solving large-scale problems. Second, they cannot cope with out-of-sample data that are not used to construct the similarity graph. To cluster each out-of-sample datum, the methods have to recalculate the similarity graph and the cluster membership of the whole data set. In this paper, we propose a unified framework which makes representation-based subspace clustering algorithms feasible to cluster both out-of-sample and large-scale data. Under our framework, the large-scale problem is tackled by converting it as out-of-sample problem in the manner of "sampling, clustering, coding, and classifying". Furthermore, we give an estimation for the error bounds by treating each subspace as a point in a hyperspace. Extensive experimental results on various benchmark data sets show that our methods outperform several recently-proposed scalable methods in clustering large-scale data set.

Given a data set from a union of multiple linear subspaces, a robust subspace clustering algorithm fits each group of data points with a low-dimensional subspace and then clusters these data even though they are grossly corrupted or sampled from the union of dependent subspaces. Under the framework of spectral clustering, recent works using sparse representation, low rank representation and their extensions achieve robust clustering results by formulating the errors (e.g., corruptions) into their objective functions so that the errors can be removed from the inputs. However, these approaches have suffered from the limitation that the structure of the errors should be known as the prior knowledge. In this paper, we present a new method of robust subspace clustering by eliminating the effect of the errors from the projection space (representation) rather than from the input space. We firstly prove that ell_1-, ell_2-, and ell_infty-norm-based linear projection spaces share the property of intra-subspace projection dominance, i.e., the coefficients over intra-subspace data points are larger than those over inter-subspace data points. Based on this property, we propose a robust and efficient subspace clustering algorithm, called Thresholding Ridge Regression (TRR). TRR calculates the ell2-norm-based coefficients of a given data set and performs a hard thresholding operator; and then the coefficients are used to build a similarity graph for clustering. Experimental studies show that TRR outperforms the state-of-the-art methods with respect to clustering quality, robustness, and time-saving.

The local neighborhood selection plays a crucial role for most representation based manifold learning algorithms. This paper reveals that an improper selection of neighborhood for learning representation will introduce negative components in the learnt representations. Importantly, the representations with negative components will affect the intrinsic manifold structure preservation. In this paper, a local non-negative pursuit (LNP) method is proposed for neighborhood selection and non-negative representations are learnt. Moreover, it is proved that the learnt representations are sparse and convex. Theoretical analysis and experimental results show that the proposed method achieves or outperforms the state-of-the-art results on various manifold learning problems.