Deep Learning Models for Retinal Blood Vessels Segmentation: A Review <s> IV. CNN-BASED IMAGES SEGMENTATION <s> Multilayer neural networks trained with the back-propagation algorithm constitute the best example of a successful gradient based learning technique. Given an appropriate network architecture, gradient-based learning algorithms can be used to synthesize a complex decision surface that can classify high-dimensional patterns, such as handwritten characters, with minimal preprocessing. This paper reviews various methods applied to handwritten character recognition and compares them on a standard handwritten digit recognition task. Convolutional neural networks, which are specifically designed to deal with the variability of 2D shapes, are shown to outperform all other techniques. Real-life document recognition systems are composed of multiple modules including field extraction, segmentation recognition, and language modeling. A new learning paradigm, called graph transformer networks (GTN), allows such multimodule systems to be trained globally using gradient-based methods so as to minimize an overall performance measure. Two systems for online handwriting recognition are described. Experiments demonstrate the advantage of global training, and the flexibility of graph transformer networks. A graph transformer network for reading a bank cheque is also described. It uses convolutional neural network character recognizers combined with global training techniques to provide record accuracy on business and personal cheques. It is deployed commercially and reads several million cheques per day. <s> BIB001 </s> Deep Learning Models for Retinal Blood Vessels Segmentation: A Review <s> IV. CNN-BASED IMAGES SEGMENTATION <s> We propose a novel deep architecture, SegNet, for semantic pixel wise image labelling. SegNet has several attractive properties; (i) it only requires forward evaluation of a fully learnt function to obtain smooth label predictions, (ii) with increasing depth, a larger context is considered for pixel labelling which improves accuracy, and (iii) it is easy to visualise the effect of feature activation(s) in the pixel label space at any depth. SegNet is composed of a stack of encoders followed by a corresponding decoder stack which feeds into a soft-max classification layer. The decoders help map low resolution feature maps at the output of the encoder stack to full input image size feature maps. This addresses an important drawback of recent deep learning approaches which have adopted networks designed for object categorization for pixel wise labelling. These methods lack a mechanism to map deep layer feature maps to input dimensions. They resort to ad hoc methods to upsample features, e.g. by replication. This results in noisy predictions and also restricts the number of pooling layers in order to avoid too much upsampling and thus reduces spatial context. SegNet overcomes these problems by learning to map encoder outputs to image pixel labels. We test the performance of SegNet on outdoor RGB scenes from CamVid, KITTI and indoor scenes from the NYU dataset. Our results show that SegNet achieves state-of-the-art performance even without use of additional cues such as depth, video frames or post-processing with CRF models. <s> BIB002 </s> Deep Learning Models for Retinal Blood Vessels Segmentation: A Review <s> IV. CNN-BASED IMAGES SEGMENTATION <s> Object detection performance, as measured on the canonical PASCAL VOC Challenge datasets, plateaued in the final years of the competition. The best-performing methods were complex ensemble systems that typically combined multiple low-level image features with high-level context. In this paper, we propose a simple and scalable detection algorithm that improves mean average precision (mAP) by more than 50 percent relative to the previous best result on VOC 2012—achieving a mAP of 62.4 percent. Our approach combines two ideas: (1) one can apply high-capacity convolutional networks (CNNs) to bottom-up region proposals in order to localize and segment objects and (2) when labeled training data are scarce, supervised pre-training for an auxiliary task, followed by domain-specific fine-tuning, boosts performance significantly. Since we combine region proposals with CNNs, we call the resulting model an R-CNN or Region-based Convolutional Network . Source code for the complete system is available at http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~rbg/rcnn. <s> BIB003 </s> Deep Learning Models for Retinal Blood Vessels Segmentation: A Review <s> IV. CNN-BASED IMAGES SEGMENTATION <s> The condition of the vascular network of human eye is an important diagnostic factor in ophthalmology. Its segmentation in fundus imaging is a nontrivial task due to variable size of vessels, relatively low contrast, and potential presence of pathologies like microaneurysms and hemorrhages. Many algorithms, both unsupervised and supervised, have been proposed for this purpose in the past. We propose a supervised segmentation technique that uses a deep neural network trained on a large (up to 400 $\thinspace$ 000) sample of examples preprocessed with global contrast normalization, zero-phase whitening, and augmented using geometric transformations and gamma corrections. Several variants of the method are considered, including structured prediction, where a network classifies multiple pixels simultaneously. When applied to standard benchmarks of fundus imaging, the DRIVE, STARE, and CHASE databases, the networks significantly outperform the previous algorithms on the area under ROC curve measure (up to $ > {0.99}$ ) and accuracy of classification (up to $ > {0.97}$ ). The method is also resistant to the phenomenon of central vessel reflex, sensitive in detection of fine vessels ( ${\rm sensitivity} > {0.87}$ ), and fares well on pathological cases. <s> BIB004 </s> Deep Learning Models for Retinal Blood Vessels Segmentation: A Review <s> IV. CNN-BASED IMAGES SEGMENTATION <s> Abstract Accurately assessment of adipose tissue volume inside a human body plays an important role in predicting disease or cancer risk, diagnosis and prognosis. In order to overcome limitation of using only one subjectively selected CT image slice to estimate size of fat areas, this study aims to develop and test a computer-aided detection (CAD) scheme based on deep learning technique to automatically segment subcutaneous fat areas (SFA) and visceral fat areas (VFA) depicting on volumetric CT images. A retrospectively collected CT image dataset was divided into two independent training and testing groups. The proposed CAD framework consisted of two steps with two convolution neural networks (CNNs) namely, Selection-CNN and Segmentation-CNN. The first CNN was trained using 2,240 CT slices to select abdominal CT slices depicting SFA and VFA. The second CNN was trained with 84,000 pixel patches and applied to the selected CT slices to identify fat-related pixels and assign them into SFA and VFA classes. Comparing to the manual CT slice selection and fat pixel segmentation results, the accuracy of CT slice selection using the Selection-CNN yielded 95.8%, while the accuracy of fat pixel segmentation using the Segmentation-CNN was 96.8%. This study demonstrated the feasibility of applying a new deep learning based CAD scheme to automatically recognize abdominal section of human body from CT scans and segment SFA and VFA from volumetric CT data with high accuracy or agreement with the manual segmentation results. <s> BIB005 </s> Deep Learning Models for Retinal Blood Vessels Segmentation: A Review <s> IV. CNN-BASED IMAGES SEGMENTATION <s> Accurate vessel segmentation is a tough task for various medical images applications especially the segmentation of retinal images vessels. A computerised algorithm is required for analysing the progress of eye diseases. A variety of computerised retinal segmentation methods have been proposed but almost all methods to date show low sensitivity for narrowly low contrast vessels. We propose a new retinal vessel segmentation algorithm to address the issue of low sensitivity. The proposed method introduces a deep learning model along with pre-processing and post-processing. The pre-processing is used to handle the issue of uneven illuminations. We design a fully Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and train it to get fine vessels observation.The post-processing step is used to remove the background noise pixels to achieve well-segmented vessels. The proposed segmentation method gives good segmented images especially for detecting tiny vessels. We evaluate our method on the commonly used publicly available databases: DRIVE and STARE databases. The higher sensitivity of 75% leads to proper detection of tiny vessels with an accuracy of 94.7%. <s> BIB006 </s> Deep Learning Models for Retinal Blood Vessels Segmentation: A Review <s> IV. CNN-BASED IMAGES SEGMENTATION <s> Convolutional networks are powerful visual models that yield hierarchies of features. We show that convolutional networks by themselves, trained end-to-end, pixels-to-pixels, improve on the previous best result in semantic segmentation. Our key insight is to build “fully convolutional” networks that take input of arbitrary size and produce correspondingly-sized output with efficient inference and learning. We define and detail the space of fully convolutional networks, explain their application to spatially dense prediction tasks, and draw connections to prior models. We adapt contemporary classification networks (AlexNet, the VGG net, and GoogLeNet) into fully convolutional networks and transfer their learned representations by fine-tuning to the segmentation task. We then define a skip architecture that combines semantic information from a deep, coarse layer with appearance information from a shallow, fine layer to produce accurate and detailed segmentations. Our fully convolutional networks achieve improved segmentation of PASCAL VOC (30% relative improvement to 67.2% mean IU on 2012), NYUDv2, SIFT Flow, and PASCAL-Context, while inference takes one tenth of a second for a typical image. <s> BIB007 </s> Deep Learning Models for Retinal Blood Vessels Segmentation: A Review <s> IV. CNN-BASED IMAGES SEGMENTATION <s> This paper addresses the problem of Human-Aware Navigation (HAN), using multi camera sensors to implement a vision-based person tracking system. The main contributions of this paper are as follows: a novel and efficient Deep Learning person detection and a standardization of human-aware constraints. In the first stage of the approach, we propose to cascade the Aggregate Channel Features (ACF) detector with a deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to achieve fast and accurate Pedestrian Detection (PD). Regarding the human awareness (that can be defined as constraints associated with the robot's motion), we use a mixture of asymmetric Gaussian functions, to define the cost functions associated to each constraint. Both methods proposed herein are evaluated individually to measure the impact of each of the components. The final solution (including both the proposed pedestrian detection and the human-aware constraints) is tested in a typical domestic indoor scenario, in four distinct experiments. The results show that the robot is able to cope with human-aware constraints, defined after common proxemics and social rules. <s> BIB008
Image segmentation is the process of assigning a label to each pixel in an image. So, it is similar to dividing the image into multiple regions so that all pixels in one region have common characteristics. At the image level, the regions have meaningful shapes and they can help in analyzing and understanding the image. Image segmentation is a computationally expensive process because it is done on the pixel level of the image. It has many practical applications in different fields, such as object detection BIB003 , face and pedestrian detection and localization BIB008 . In the medical field, image segmentation is used to locate tumors  , measure tissue volumes BIB005 , and retinal vessels segmentation BIB006 . Before introducing deep learning techniques, conventional approaches have been proposed to solve image segmentation task such as thresholding, clustering methods, and histogram-based methods. Nowadays, deep learning represents a leading-edge technology that is validated by the research community, where neural network existed for decades BIB001 . In particular, deep learning refers to solve the imaging problem through training a neural network model. The word deep contains the idea of having a number of layers of processing image/signal units, which is similar to the structure of the neurons in the brain. The main advantage of deep learning is their capability to automatically learn the best features according to their training dataset. This allows avoiding the time-consuming process of manual selection of the features of a particular task either it is classification or regression. In retinal vessels segmentation, segmenting tiny vessels is a very difficult task as most convention methods missed them during the segmentation process, while the automated detection of retinal blood vessels has better performance by using the deep learning methods. Carefully designed CNN can detect these tiny vessels and segment them, even it is usually difficult for an expert to analyze these blood vessels as it is reported in BIB004 . CNN model is proposed to overcome this issue (as shown in Figure 10 ). Various methods are developed based on deep learning for retinal image analysis and we elaborate these methods in the next sections. In general image segmentation, one of the leading architecture proposed for image segmentation and dense prediction was Fully Convolutional Network (FCN) BIB007 in 2014. From its name, one can see that this architecture is composed of convolutional layers without using fully-connected layers. This allows the segmentation image to be generated from any input image with arbitrary size. After that, different architectures have been proposed for image segmentation. U-Net  is an encoder-decoder architecture which was proposed to segment medical images. The encoder part extracts the features from the input image and reduces the resolution of the input image through the pooling layers, and the decoder part reconstruct the image and recovers the object details with the help of the skip connections between the encoder and the decoder layers. SegNet BIB002 is another architecture proposed for image segmentation. The authors introduce the transferring of max pooling indices instead of the whole values from the encoder to the decoder using skip connections to improve the segmentation resolution for faster training. In general, CNN architectures show impressive results in image segmentation, and there is still a large room for improvement that can be done to enhance the segmentation accuracy.