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Joint image and feature adaptative attention-aware networks for cross-modality semantic segmentation

  • S.I. : Deep Geospatial Data Understanding
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Abstract

Deep learning-based methods are widely used for the task of semantic segmentation in recent years. However, due to the difficulty and labor cost of collecting pixel-level annotations, it is hard to acquire sufficient training images for a certain imaging modality, which greatly hinders the performance of these methods. The intuitive solution to this issue is to train a pre-trained model on label-rich imaging modality (source domain) and then apply the pre-trained model to the label-poor imaging modality (target domain). Unsurprisingly, since the severe domain shift between different modalities, the pre-trained model would perform poorly on the target imaging modality. To this end, we propose a novel unsupervised domain adaptation framework, called Joint Image and Feature Adaptive Attention-aware Networks (JIFAAN), to alleviate the domain shift for cross-modality semantic segmentation. The proposed framework mainly consists of two procedures. The first procedure is image adaptation, which transforms the source domain images into target-like images using the adversarial learning with cycle-consistency constraint. For further bridging the gap between transformed images and target domain images, the second procedure employs feature adaptation to extract the domain-invariant features and thus aligns the distribution in feature space. In particular, we introduce an attention module in the feature adaptation to focus on noteworthy regions and generate attention-aware results. Lastly, we combine two procedures in an end-to-end manner. Experiments on two cross-modality semantic segmentation datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework. Specifically, JIFAAN surpasses the cutting-edge domain adaptation methods and achieves the state-of-the-art performance.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 61822113 and Grant 62076186, in part by Science and Technology Major Project of Hubei Province (Next-Generation AI Technologies) under Grant 2019AEA170 and in part by the Wuhan Chang'e Information Technology Co., Ltd. The numerical calculations in this paper have been done on the supercomputing system in the Supercomputing Center of Wuhan University.

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Correspondence to Fei Liao or Juhua Liu.

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Zhong, Q., Zeng, F., Liao, F. et al. Joint image and feature adaptative attention-aware networks for cross-modality semantic segmentation. Neural Comput & Applic 35, 3665–3676 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00521-021-06064-w

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