Jiang Liu

Bio: Jiang Liu is an academic researcher from Southern University of Science and Technology. The author has contributed to research in topics: Image segmentation & Optic cup (anatomical). The author has an hindex of 40, co-authored 367 publications receiving 7564 citations. Previous affiliations of Jiang Liu include Institute for Infocomm Research Singapore & National University of Singapore.

CE-Net: Context Encoder Network for 2D Medical Image Segmentation

Abstract: Medical image segmentation is an important step in medical image analysis. With the rapid development of a convolutional neural network in image processing, deep learning has been used for medical image segmentation, such as optic disc segmentation, blood vessel detection, lung segmentation, cell segmentation, and so on. Previously, U-net based approaches have been proposed. However, the consecutive pooling and strided convolutional operations led to the loss of some spatial information. In this paper, we propose a context encoder network (CE-Net) to capture more high-level information and preserve spatial information for 2D medical image segmentation. CE-Net mainly contains three major components: a feature encoder module, a context extractor, and a feature decoder module. We use the pretrained ResNet block as the fixed feature extractor. The context extractor module is formed by a newly proposed dense atrous convolution block and a residual multi-kernel pooling block. We applied the proposed CE-Net to different 2D medical image segmentation tasks. Comprehensive results show that the proposed method outperforms the original U-Net method and other state-of-the-art methods for optic disc segmentation, vessel detection, lung segmentation, cell contour segmentation, and retinal optical coherence tomography layer segmentation.

CE-Net: Context Encoder Network for 2D Medical Image Segmentation

Abstract: Medical image segmentation is an important step in medical image analysis. With the rapid development of convolutional neural network in image processing, deep learning has been used for medical image segmentation, such as optic disc segmentation, blood vessel detection, lung segmentation, cell segmentation, etc. Previously, U-net based approaches have been proposed. However, the consecutive pooling and strided convolutional operations lead to the loss of some spatial information. In this paper, we propose a context encoder network (referred to as CE-Net) to capture more high-level information and preserve spatial information for 2D medical image segmentation. CE-Net mainly contains three major components: a feature encoder module, a context extractor and a feature decoder module. We use pretrained ResNet block as the fixed feature extractor. The context extractor module is formed by a newly proposed dense atrous convolution (DAC) block and residual multi-kernel pooling (RMP) block. We applied the proposed CE-Net to different 2D medical image segmentation tasks. Comprehensive results show that the proposed method outperforms the original U-Net method and other state-of-the-art methods for optic disc segmentation, vessel detection, lung segmentation, cell contour segmentation and retinal optical coherence tomography layer segmentation.

Joint Optic Disc and Cup Segmentation Based on Multi-Label Deep Network and Polar Transformation

Abstract: Glaucoma is a chronic eye disease that leads to irreversible vision loss. The cup to disc ratio (CDR) plays an important role in the screening and diagnosis of glaucoma. Thus, the accurate and automatic segmentation of optic disc (OD) and optic cup (OC) from fundus images is a fundamental task. Most existing methods segment them separately, and rely on hand-crafted visual feature from fundus images. In this paper, we propose a deep learning architecture, named M-Net, which solves the OD and OC segmentation jointly in a one-stage multi-label system. The proposed M-Net mainly consists of multi-scale input layer, U-shape convolutional network, side-output layer, and multi-label loss function. The multi-scale input layer constructs an image pyramid to achieve multiple level receptive field sizes. The U-shape convolutional network is employed as the main body network structure to learn the rich hierarchical representation, while the side-output layer acts as an early classifier that produces a companion local prediction map for different scale layers. Finally, a multi-label loss function is proposed to generate the final segmentation map. For improving the segmentation performance further, we also introduce the polar transformation, which provides the representation of the original image in the polar coordinate system. The experiments show that our M-Net system achieves state-of-the-art OD and OC segmentation result on ORIGA data set. Simultaneously, the proposed method also obtains the satisfactory glaucoma screening performances with calculated CDR value on both ORIGA and SCES datasets.

Superpixel Classification Based Optic Disc and Optic Cup Segmentation for Glaucoma Screening

Abstract: Glaucoma is a chronic eye disease that leads to vision loss. As it cannot be cured, detecting the disease in time is important. Current tests using intraocular pressure (IOP) are not sensitive enough for population based glaucoma screening. Optic nerve head assessment in retinal fundus images is both more promising and superior. This paper proposes optic disc and optic cup segmentation using superpixel classification for glaucoma screening. In optic disc segmentation, histograms, and center surround statistics are used to classify each superpixel as disc or non-disc. A self-assessment reliability score is computed to evaluate the quality of the automated optic disc segmentation. For optic cup segmentation, in addition to the histograms and center surround statistics, the location information is also included into the feature space to boost the performance. The proposed segmentation methods have been evaluated in a database of 650 images with optic disc and optic cup boundaries manually marked by trained professionals. Experimental results show an average overlapping error of 9.5% and 24.1% in optic disc and optic cup segmentation, respectively. The results also show an increase in overlapping error as the reliability score is reduced, which justifies the effectiveness of the self-assessment. The segmented optic disc and optic cup are then used to compute the cup to disc ratio for glaucoma screening. Our proposed method achieves areas under curve of 0.800 and 0.822 in two data sets, which is higher than other methods. The methods can be used for segmentation and glaucoma screening. The self-assessment will be used as an indicator of cases with large errors and enhance the clinical deployment of the automatic segmentation and screening.

DeepVessel: Retinal Vessel Segmentation via Deep Learning and Conditional Random Field

Abstract: Retinal vessel segmentation is a fundamental step for various ocular imaging applications. In this paper, we formulate the retinal vessel segmentation problem as a boundary detection task and solve it using a novel deep learning architecture. Our method is based on two key ideas: (1) applying a multi-scale and multi-level Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with a side-output layer to learn a rich hierarchical representation, and (2) utilizing a Conditional Random Field (CRF) to model the long-range interactions between pixels. We combine the CNN and CRF layers into an integrated deep network called DeepVessel. Our experiments show that the DeepVessel system achieves state-of-the-art retinal vessel segmentation performance on the DRIVE, STARE, and CHASE_DB1 datasets with an efficient running time.

Image Processing

Abstract: MUCKE aims to mine a large volume of images, to structure them conceptually and to use this conceptual structuring in order to improve large-scale image retrieval. The last decade witnessed important progress concerning low-level image representations. However, there are a number problems which need to be solved in order to unleash the full potential of image mining in applications. The central problem with low-level representations is the mismatch between them and the human interpretation of image content. This problem can be instantiated, for instance, by the incapability of existing descriptors to capture spatial relationships between the concepts represented or by their incapability to convey an explanation of why two images are similar in a content-based image retrieval framework. We start by assessing existing local descriptors for image classification and by proposing to use co-occurrence matrices to better capture spatial relationships in images. The main focus in MUCKE is on cleaning large scale Web image corpora and on proposing image representations which are closer to the human interpretation of images. Consequently, we introduce methods which tackle these two problems and compare results to state of the art methods. Note: some aspects of this deliverable are withheld at this time as they are pending review. Please contact the authors for a preview.

Robot vision

Abstract: A scheme is developed for classifying the types of motion perceived by a humanlike robot. It is assumed that the robot receives visual images of the scene using a perspective system model. Equations, theorems, concepts, clues, etc., relating the objects, their positions, and their motion to their images on the focal plane are presented. >