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arXiv2023

BerDiff: Conditional Bernoulli Diffusion Model for Medical Image Segmentation

Medical image segmentation is a challenging task with inherent ambiguity and high uncertainty, attributed to factors such as unclear tumor boundaries and multiple plausible annotations. The accuracy and diversity of segmentation masks are both crucial for providing valuable references to radiologists in clinical practice. While existing diffusion models have shown strong capacities in various visual generation tasks, it is still challenging to deal with discrete masks in segmentation. To achieve accurate and diverse medical image segmentation masks, we propose a novel conditional Bernoulli Diffusion model for medical image segmentation (BerDiff). Instead of using the Gaussian noise, we first propose to use the Bernoulli noise as the diffusion kernel to enhance the capacity of the diffusion model for binary segmentation tasks, resulting in more accurate segmentation masks. Second, by leveraging the stochastic nature of the diffusion model, our BerDiff randomly samples the initial Bernoulli noise and intermediate latent variables multiple times to produce a range of diverse segmentation masks, which can highlight salient regions of interest that can serve as valuable references for radiologists. In addition, our BerDiff can efficiently sample sub-sequences from the overall trajectory of the reverse diffusion, thereby speeding up the segmentation process. Extensive experimental results on two medical image segmentation datasets with different modalities demonstrate that our BerDiff outperforms other recently published state-of-the-art methods. Our results suggest diffusion models could serve as a strong backbone for medical image segmentation.

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arXiv2010

Image Segmentation by Using Threshold Techniques

This paper attempts to undertake the study of segmentation image techniques by using five threshold methods as Mean method, P-tile method, Histogram Dependent Technique (HDT), Edge Maximization Technique (EMT) and visual Technique and they are compared with one another so as to choose the best technique for threshold segmentation techniques image. These techniques applied on three satellite images to choose base guesses for threshold segmentation image.

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arXiv2014

Combined Approach for Image Segmentation

Many image segmentation techniques have been developed over the past two decades for segmenting the images, which help for object recognition, occlusion boundary estimation within motion or stereo systems, image compression, image editing. In this, there is a combined approach for segmenting the image. By using histogram equalization to the input image, from which it gives contrast enhancement output image .After that by applying median filtering,which will remove noise from contrast output image . At last I applied fuzzy c-mean clustering algorithm to denoising output image, which give segmented output image. In this way it produce better segmented image with less computation time.

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arXiv2025

KM-UNet KAN Mamba UNet for medical image segmentation

Medical image segmentation is a critical task in medical imaging analysis. Traditional CNN-based methods struggle with modeling long-range dependencies, while Transformer-based models, despite their success, suffer from quadratic computational complexity. To address these limitations, we propose KM-UNet, a novel U-shaped network architecture that combines the strengths of Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) and state-space models (SSMs). KM-UNet leverages the Kolmogorov-Arnold representation theorem for efficient feature representation and SSMs for scalable long-range modeling, achieving a balance between accuracy and computational efficiency. We evaluate KM-UNet on five benchmark datasets: ISIC17, ISIC18, CVC, BUSI, and GLAS. Experimental results demonstrate that KM-UNet achieves competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art methods in medical image segmentation tasks. To the best of our knowledge, KM-UNet is the first medical image segmentation framework integrating KANs and SSMs. This work provides a valuable baseline and new insights for the development of more efficient and interpretable medical image segmentation systems. The code is open source at https://github.com/2760613195/KM_UNet Keywords:KAN,Manba, state-space models,UNet, Medical image segmentation, Deep learning

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arXiv2026

Active contours driven by local and global intensity fitting energy with application to SAR image segmentation and its fast solvers

In this paper, we propose a novel variational active contour model based on Aubert-Aujol (AA) denoising model, which hybrides geodesic active contour (GAC) model with active contours without edges (ACWE) model and can be used to segment images corrupted by multiplicative gamma noise. We transform the proposed model into classic ROF model by adding a proximity term.[26] was submitted on 29-Aug-2013, and our early edition was ever submitted to TGRS on 12-Jun-2012, Venkatakrishnan et al.[27] proposed their PnP algorithm on 29-May-2013, so Venkatakrishnan and we proposed the PnP algorithm almost simultaneously. Inspired by a fast denosing algorithm proposed by Jia-Zhao recently, we propose two fast fixed point algorithms to solve SAR image segmentation question.

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arXiv2022

Exemplar Learning for Medical Image Segmentation

Medical image annotation typically requires expert knowledge and hence incurs time-consuming and expensive data annotation costs. To alleviate this burden, we propose a novel learning scenario, Exemplar Learning (EL), to explore automated learning processes for medical image segmentation with a single annotated image example. This innovative learning task is particularly suitable for medical image segmentation, where all categories of organs can be presented in one single image and annotated all at once. To address this challenging EL task, we propose an Exemplar Learning-based Synthesis Net (ELSNet) framework for medical image segmentation that enables innovative exemplar-based data synthesis, pixel-prototype based contrastive embedding learning, and pseudo-label based exploitation of the unlabeled data. Specifically, ELSNet introduces two new modules for image segmentation: an exemplar-guided synthesis module, which enriches and diversifies the training set by synthesizing annotated samples from the given exemplar, and a pixel-prototype based contrastive embedding module, which enhances the discriminative capacity of the base segmentation model via contrastive representation learning. Moreover, we deploy a two-stage process for segmentation model training, which exploits the unlabeled data with predicted pseudo segmentation labels. To evaluate this new learning framework, we conduct extensive experiments on several organ segmentation datasets and present an in-depth analysis. The empirical results show that the proposed exemplar learning framework produces effective segmentation results.

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arXiv2026

ARGenSeg: Image Segmentation with Autoregressive Image Generation Model

We propose a novel AutoRegressive Generation-based paradigm for image Segmentation (ARGenSeg), achieving multimodal understanding and pixel-level perception within a unified framework. Prior works integrating image segmentation into multimodal large language models (MLLMs) typically employ either boundary points representation or dedicated segmentation heads. These methods rely on discrete representations or semantic prompts fed into task-specific decoders, which limits the ability of the MLLM to capture fine-grained visual details. To address these challenges, we introduce a segmentation framework for MLLM based on image generation, which naturally produces dense masks for target objects. We leverage MLLM to output visual tokens and detokenize them into images using an universal VQ-VAE, making the segmentation fully dependent on the pixel-level understanding of the MLLM. To reduce inference latency, we employ a next-scale-prediction strategy to generate required visual tokens in parallel. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method surpasses prior state-of-the-art approaches on multiple segmentation datasets with a remarkable boost in inference speed, while maintaining strong understanding capabilities.

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arXiv2025

MorphSAM: Learning the Morphological Prompts from Atlases for Spine Image Segmentation

Spine image segmentation is crucial for clinical diagnosis and treatment of spine diseases. The complex structure of the spine and the high morphological similarity between individual vertebrae and adjacent intervertebral discs make accurate spine segmentation a challenging task. Although the Segment Anything Model (SAM) has been proposed, it still struggles to effectively capture and utilize morphological information, limiting its ability to enhance spine image segmentation performance. To address these challenges, in this paper, we propose a MorphSAM that explicitly learns morphological information from atlases, thereby strengthening the spine image segmentation performance of SAM. Specifically, the MorphSAM includes two fully automatic prompt learning networks, 1) an anatomical prompt learning network that directly learns morphological information from anatomical atlases, and 2) a semantic prompt learning network that derives morphological information from text descriptions converted from the atlases. Then, the two learned morphological prompts are fed into the SAM model to boost the segmentation performance. We validate our MorphSAM on two spine image segmentation tasks, including a spine anatomical structure segmentation task with CT images and a lumbosacral plexus segmentation task with MR images. Experimental results demonstrate that our MorphSAM achieves superior segmentation performance when compared to the state-of-the-art methods.

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arXiv2025

TFANet: Three-Stage Image-Text Feature Alignment Network for Robust Referring Image Segmentation

Referring Image Segmentation (RIS) is a task that segments image regions based on language expressions, requiring fine-grained alignment between two modalities. However, existing methods often struggle with multimodal misalignment and language semantic loss, especially in complex scenes containing multiple visually similar objects, where uniquely described targets are frequently mislocalized or incompletely segmented. To tackle these challenges, this paper proposes TFANet, a Three-stage Image-Text Feature Alignment Network that systematically enhances multimodal alignment through a hierarchical framework comprising three stages: Knowledge Plus Stage (KPS), Knowledge Fusion Stage (KFS), and Knowledge Intensification Stage (KIS). In the first stage, we design the Multiscale Linear Cross-Attention Module (MLAM), which facilitates bidirectional semantic exchange between visual features and textual representations across multiple scales. This establishes rich and efficient alignment between image regions and different granularities of linguistic descriptions. Subsequently, the KFS further strengthens feature alignment through the Cross-modal Feature Scanning Module (CFSM), which applies multimodal selective scanning to capture long-range dependencies and construct a unified multimodal representation. This is essential for modeling long-range cross-modal dependencies and enhancing alignment accuracy in complex scenes. Finally, in the KIS, we propose the Word-level Linguistic Feature-guided Semantic Deepening Module (WFDM) to compensate for semantic degradation introduced in earlier stages.

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arXiv2022

3D-UCaps: 3D Capsules Unet for Volumetric Image Segmentation

Medical image segmentation has been so far achieving promising results with Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). However, it is arguable that in traditional CNNs, its pooling layer tends to discard important information such as positions. Moreover, CNNs are sensitive to rotation and affine transformation. Capsule network is a data-efficient network design proposed to overcome such limitations by replacing pooling layers with dynamic routing and convolutional strides, which aims to preserve the part-whole relationships. Capsule network has shown a great performance in image recognition and natural language processing, but applications for medical image segmentation, particularly volumetric image segmentation, has been limited. In this work, we propose 3D-UCaps, a 3D voxel-based Capsule network for medical volumetric image segmentation. We build the concept of capsules into a CNN by designing a network with two pathways: the first pathway is encoded by 3D Capsule blocks, whereas the second pathway is decoded by 3D CNNs blocks. 3D-UCaps, therefore inherits the merits from both Capsule network to preserve the spatial relationship and CNNs to learn visual representation. We conducted experiments on various datasets to demonstrate the robustness of 3D-UCaps including iSeg-2017, LUNA16, Hippocampus, and Cardiac, where our method outperforms previous Capsule networks and 3D-Unets.

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arXiv2023

Pixel-Level Clustering Network for Unsupervised Image Segmentation

While image segmentation is crucial in various computer vision applications, such as autonomous driving, grasping, and robot navigation, annotating all objects at the pixel-level for training is nearly impossible. Therefore, the study of unsupervised image segmentation methods is essential. In this paper, we present a pixel-level clustering framework for segmenting images into regions without using ground truth annotations. The proposed framework includes feature embedding modules with an attention mechanism, a feature statistics computing module, image reconstruction, and superpixel segmentation to achieve accurate unsupervised segmentation. Additionally, we propose a training strategy that utilizes intra-consistency within each superpixel, inter-similarity/dissimilarity between neighboring superpixels, and structural similarity between images. To avoid potential over-segmentation caused by superpixel-based losses, we also propose a post-processing method. Furthermore, we present an extension of the proposed method for unsupervised semantic segmentation. We conducted experiments on three publicly available datasets (Berkeley segmentation dataset, PASCAL VOC 2012 dataset, and COCO-Stuff dataset) to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. The experimental results show that the proposed framework outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods.

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arXiv2025

Show and Segment: Universal Medical Image Segmentation via In-Context Learning

Medical image segmentation remains challenging due to the vast diversity of anatomical structures, imaging modalities, and segmentation tasks. While deep learning has made significant advances, current approaches struggle to generalize as they require task-specific training or fine-tuning on unseen classes. We present Iris, a novel In-context Reference Image guided Segmentation framework that enables flexible adaptation to novel tasks through the use of reference examples without fine-tuning. At its core, Iris features a lightweight context task encoding module that distills task-specific information from reference context image-label pairs. This rich context embedding information is used to guide the segmentation of target objects. By decoupling task encoding from inference, Iris supports diverse strategies from one-shot inference and context example ensemble to object-level context example retrieval and in-context tuning. Through comprehensive evaluation across twelve datasets, we demonstrate that Iris performs strongly compared to task-specific models on in-distribution tasks. On seven held-out datasets, Iris shows superior generalization to out-of-distribution data and unseen classes. Further, Iris's task encoding module can automatically discover anatomical relationships across datasets and modalities, offering insights into medical objects without explicit anatomical supervision.

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arXiv2019

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

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.

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arXiv2012

An efficient hierarchical graph based image segmentation

Hierarchical image segmentation provides region-oriented scalespace, i.e., a set of image segmentations at different detail levels in which the segmentations at finer levels are nested with respect to those at coarser levels. Most image segmentation algorithms, such as region merging algorithms, rely on a criterion for merging that does not lead to a hierarchy, and for which the tuning of the parameters can be difficult. In this work, we propose a hierarchical graph based image segmentation relying on a criterion popularized by Felzenzwalb and Huttenlocher. We illustrate with both real and synthetic images, showing efficiency, ease of use, and robustness of our method.

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arXiv2020

DoubleU-Net: A Deep Convolutional Neural Network for Medical Image Segmentation

Semantic image segmentation is the process of labeling each pixel of an image with its corresponding class. An encoder-decoder based approach, like U-Net and its variants, is a popular strategy for solving medical image segmentation tasks. To improve the performance of U-Net on various segmentation tasks, we propose a novel architecture called DoubleU-Net, which is a combination of two U-Net architectures stacked on top of each other. The first U-Net uses a pre-trained VGG-19 as the encoder, which has already learned features from ImageNet and can be transferred to another task easily. To capture more semantic information efficiently, we added another U-Net at the bottom. We also adopt Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling (ASPP) to capture contextual information within the network. We have evaluated DoubleU-Net using four medical segmentation datasets, covering various imaging modalities such as colonoscopy, dermoscopy, and microscopy. Experiments on the MICCAI 2015 segmentation challenge, the CVC-ClinicDB, the 2018 Data Science Bowl challenge, and the Lesion boundary segmentation datasets demonstrate that the DoubleU-Net outperforms U-Net and the baseline models. Moreover, DoubleU-Net produces more accurate segmentation masks, especially in the case of the CVC-ClinicDB and MICCAI 2015 segmentation challenge datasets, which have challenging images such as smaller and flat polyps. These results show the improvement over the existing U-Net model. The encouraging results, produced on various medical image segmentation datasets, show that DoubleU-Net can be used as a strong baseline for both medical image segmentation and cross-dataset evaluation testing to measure the generalizability of Deep Learning (DL) models.

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arXiv2023

A hybrid approach for improving U-Net variants in medical image segmentation

Medical image segmentation is vital to the area of medical imaging because it enables professionals to more accurately examine and understand the information offered by different imaging modalities. The technique of splitting a medical image into various segments or regions of interest is known as medical image segmentation. The segmented images that are produced can be used for many different things, including diagnosis, surgery planning, and therapy evaluation. In initial phase of research, major focus has been given to review existing deep-learning approaches, including researches like MultiResUNet, Attention U-Net, classical U-Net, and other variants. The attention feature vectors or maps dynamically add important weights to critical information, and most of these variants use these to increase accuracy, but the network parameter requirements are somewhat more stringent. They face certain problems such as overfitting, as their number of trainable parameters is very high, and so is their inference time. Therefore, the aim of this research is to reduce the network parameter requirements using depthwise separable convolutions, while maintaining performance over some medical image segmentation tasks such as skin lesion segmentation using attention system and residual connections.

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arXiv2021

SpecTr: Spectral Transformer for Hyperspectral Pathology Image Segmentation

Hyperspectral imaging (HSI) unlocks the huge potential to a wide variety of applications relied on high-precision pathology image segmentation, such as computational pathology and precision medicine. Since hyperspectral pathology images benefit from the rich and detailed spectral information even beyond the visible spectrum, the key to achieve high-precision hyperspectral pathology image segmentation is to felicitously model the context along high-dimensional spectral bands. Inspired by the strong context modeling ability of transformers, we hereby, for the first time, formulate the contextual feature learning across spectral bands for hyperspectral pathology image segmentation as a sequence-to-sequence prediction procedure by transformers. To assist spectral context learning procedure, we introduce two important strategies: (1) a sparsity scheme enforces the learned contextual relationship to be sparse, so as to eliminates the distraction from the redundant bands; (2) a spectral normalization, a separate group normalization for each spectral band, mitigates the nuisance caused by heterogeneous underlying distributions of bands. We name our method Spectral Transformer (SpecTr), which enjoys two benefits: (1) it has a strong ability to model long-range dependency among spectral bands, and (2) it jointly explores the spatial-spectral features of HSI. Experiments show that SpecTr outperforms other competing methods in a hyperspectral pathology image segmentation benchmark without the need of pre-training. Code is available at https://github.com/hfut-xc-yun/SpecTr.

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arXiv2023

FVP: Fourier Visual Prompting for Source-Free Unsupervised Domain Adaptation of Medical Image Segmentation

Medical image segmentation methods normally perform poorly when there is a domain shift between training and testing data. Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) addresses the domain shift problem by training the model using both labeled data from the source domain and unlabeled data from the target domain. Source-Free UDA (SFUDA) was recently proposed for UDA without requiring the source data during the adaptation, due to data privacy or data transmission issues, which normally adapts the pre-trained deep model in the testing stage. However, in real clinical scenarios of medical image segmentation, the trained model is normally frozen in the testing stage. In this paper, we propose Fourier Visual Prompting (FVP) for SFUDA of medical image segmentation. Inspired by prompting learning in natural language processing, FVP steers the frozen pre-trained model to perform well in the target domain by adding a visual prompt to the input target data. In FVP, the visual prompt is parameterized using only a small amount of low-frequency learnable parameters in the input frequency space, and is learned by minimizing the segmentation loss between the predicted segmentation of the prompted target image and reliable pseudo segmentation label of the target image under the frozen model. To our knowledge, FVP is the first work to apply visual prompts to SFUDA for medical image segmentation. The proposed FVP is validated using three public datasets, and experiments demonstrate that FVP yields better segmentation results, compared with various existing methods.

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