Kevis-Kokitsi Maninis

Deep Retinal Image Understanding

This paper presents Deep Retinal Image Understanding (DRIU), a unified framework of retinal image analysis that provides both retinal vessel and optic disc segmentation. We make use of deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), which have proven revolutionary in other fields of computer vision such as object detection and image classification, and we bring their power to the study of eye fundus images. DRIU uses a base network architecture on which two set of specialized layers are trained to solve both the retinal vessel and optic disc segmentation. We present experimental validation, both qualitative and quantitative, in four public datasets for these tasks. In all of them, DRIU presents super-human performance, that is, it shows results more consistent with a gold standard than a second human annotator used as control.

One-Shot Video Object Segmentation

This paper tackles the task of semi-supervised video object segmentation, i.e., the separation of an object from the background in a video, given the mask of the first frame. We present One-Shot Video Object Segmentation (OSVOS), based on a fully-convolutional neural network architecture that is able to successively transfer generic semantic information, learned on ImageNet, to the task of foreground segmentation, and finally to learning the appearance of a single annotated object of the test sequence (hence one-shot). Although all frames are processed independently, the results are temporally coherent and stable. We perform experiments on two annotated video segmentation databases, which show that OSVOS is fast and improves the state of the art by a significant margin (79.8% vs 68.0%).

Convolutional Oriented Boundaries

We present Convolutional Oriented Boundaries (COB), which produces multiscale oriented contours and region hierarchies starting from generic image classification Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). COB is computationally efficient, because it requires a single CNN forward pass for contour detection and it uses a novel sparse boundary representation for hierarchical segmentation; it gives a significant leap in performance over the state-of-the-art, and it generalizes very well to unseen categories and datasets. Particularly, we show that learning to estimate not only contour strength but also orientation provides more accurate results. We perform extensive experiments on BSDS, PASCAL Context, PASCAL Segmentation, and MS-COCO, showing that COB provides state-of-the-art contours, region hierarchies, and object proposals in all datasets.

Convolutional Oriented Boundaries: From Image Segmentation to High-Level Tasks

We present Convolutional Oriented Boundaries (COB), which produces multiscale oriented contours and region hierarchies starting from generic image classification Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). COB is computationally efficient, because it requires a single CNN forward pass for multi-scale contour detection and it uses a novel sparse boundary representation for hierarchical segmentation; it gives a significant leap in performance over the state-of-the-art, and it generalizes very well to unseen categories and datasets. Particularly, we show that learning to estimate not only contour strength but also orientation provides more accurate results. We perform extensive experiments for low-level applications on BSDS, PASCAL Context, PASCAL Segmentation, and NYUD to evaluate boundary detection performance, showing that COB provides state-of-the-art contours and region hierarchies in all datasets. We also evaluate COB on high-level tasks when coupled with multiple pipelines for object proposals, semantic contours, semantic segmentation, and object detection on MS-COCO, SBD, and PASCAL; showing that COB also improves the results for all tasks.

Deep retinal image understanding

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a major progressive neurodegenerative disorder. Accurate diagnosis of PD is crucial to control the symptoms appropri‐ ately. However, its clinical diagnosis mostly relies on the subjective judgment of physicians and the clinical symptoms that often appear late. Recent neuroimaging techniques, along with machine learning methods, provide alternative solutions for PD screening. In this paper, we propose a novel feature selection technique, based on iterative canonical correlation analysis (ICCA), to investigate the roles of different brain regions in PD through T1-weighted MR images. First of all, gray matter and white matter tissue volumes in brain regions of interest are extracted as two feature vectors. Then, a small group of significant features were selected using the iterative structure of our proposed ICCA framework from both feature vectors. Finally, the selected features are used to build a robust classifier for automatic diagnosis of PD. Experimental results show that the proposed feature selection method results in better diagnosis accuracy, compared to the baseline and state-of-the-art methods.

Automatic Tool Landmark Detection for Stereo Vision in Robot-Assisted Retinal Surgery

Computer vision and robotics are being increasingly applied in medical interventions. Especially in interventions where extreme precision is required, they could make a difference. One such application is robot-assisted retinal microsurgery. In recent works, such interventions are conducted under a stereo-microscope, and with a robot-controlled surgical tool. The complementarity of computer vision and robotics has, however, not yet been fully exploited. In order to improve the robot control, we are interested in three-dimensional (3-D) reconstruction of the anatomy and in automatic tool localization using a stereo microscope. In this letter, we solve this problem for the first time using a single pipeline, starting from uncalibrated cameras to reach metric 3-D reconstruction and registration, in retinal microsurgery. The key ingredients of our method are 1) surgical tool landmark detection, and 2) 3-D reconstruction with the stereo microscope, using the detected landmarks. To address the former, we propose a novel deep learning method that detects and recognizes keypoints in high-definition images at higher than real-time speed. We use the detected two-dimensional keypoints along with their corresponding 3-D coordinates obtained from the robot sensors to calibrate the stereo microscope using an affine projection model. We design an online 3-D reconstruction pipeline that makes use of smoothness constraints and performs robot-to-camera registration. The entire pipeline is extensively validated on open-sky porcine eye sequences. Quantitative and qualitative results are presented for all steps.

Iterative Deep Retinal Topology Extraction

This paper tackles the task of estimating the topology of filamentary networks such as retinal vessels. Building on top of a global model that performs a dense semantical classification of the pixels of the image, we design a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) that predicts the local connectivity between the central pixel of an input patch and its border points. By iterating this local connectivity we sweep the whole image and infer the global topology of the filamentary network, inspired by a human delineating a complex network with the tip of their finger. We perform a qualitative and quantitative evaluation on retinal veins and arteries topology extraction on DRIVE dataset, where we show superior performance to very strong baselines.