Search

When pixel-level masks or partial annotations are not available for training neural networks for semantic segmentation, it is possible to use higher-level information in the form of bounding boxes, or image tags. In the imaging sciences, many applications do not have an object-background structure and bounding boxes are not available. Any available annotation typically comes from ground truth or domain experts. A direct way to train without masks is using prior knowledge on the size of objects/classes in the segmentation. We present a new algorithm to include such information via constraints on the network output, implemented via projection-based point-to-set distance functions. This type of distance functions always has the same functional form of the derivative, and avoids the need to adapt penalty functions to different constraints, as well as issues related to constraining properties typically associated with non-differentiable functions. Whereas object size information is known to enable object segmentation from bounding boxes from datasets with many general and medical images, we show that the applications extend to the imaging sciences where data represents indirect measurements, even in the case of single examples. We illustrate the capabilities in case of a) one or more classes do not have any annotation; b) there is no annotation at all; c) there are bounding boxes. We use data for hyperspectral time-lapse imaging, object segmentation in corrupted images, and sub-surface aquifer mapping from airborne-geophysical remote-sensing data. The examples verify that the developed methodology alleviates difficulties with annotating non-visual imagery for a range of experimental settings.

Tracking a horizon in seismic images or 3D volumes is an integral part of seismic interpretation. The last few decades saw progress in using neural networks for this task, starting from shallow networks for 1D traces, to deeper convolutional neural networks for large 2D images. Because geological structures are intrinsically 3D, we hope to see improved horizon tracking by training networks on 3D seismic data cubes. While there are some 3D convolutional neural networks for various seismic interpretation tasks, they are restricted to shallow networks or relatively small 3D inputs because of memory limitations. The required memory for the network states and weights increases with network depth. We present a fully reversible network for horizon tracking that has a memory requirement that is independent of network depth. To tackle memory issues regarding the network weights, we use layers that train in a factorized form directly. Therefore, we can maintain a large number of network channels while keeping the number of convolutional kernels low. We use the saved memory to increase the input size of the data by order of magnitude such that the network can better learn from large structures in the data. A field data example verifies the proposed network structure is suitable for seismic horizon tracking.

Recently established equivalences between differential equations and the structure of neural networks enabled some interpretation of training of a neural network as partial-differential-equation (PDE) constrained optimization. We add to the previously established connections, explicit regularization that is particularly beneficial in the case of single large-scale examples with partial annotation. We show that explicit regularization of model parameters in PDE constrained optimization translates to regularization of the network output. Examination of the structure of the corresponding Lagrangian and backpropagation algorithm do not reveal additional computational challenges. A hyperspectral imaging example shows that minimum prior information together with cross-validation for optimal regularization parameters boosts the segmentation accuracy.

The large spatial/frequency scale of hyperspectral and airborne magnetic and gravitational data causes memory issues when using convolutional neural networks for (sub-) surface characterization. Recently developed fully reversible networks can mostly avoid memory limitations by virtue of having a low and fixed memory requirement for storing network states, as opposed to the typical linear memory growth with depth. Fully reversible networks enable the training of deep neural networks that take in entire data volumes, and create semantic segmentations in one go. This approach avoids the need to work in small patches or map a data patch to the class of just the central pixel. The cross-entropy loss function requires small modifications to work in conjunction with a fully reversible network and learn from sparsely sampled labels without ever seeing fully labeled ground truth. We show examples from land-use change detection from hyperspectral time-lapse data, and regional aquifer mapping from airborne geophysical and geological data.

Many works on inverse problems in the imaging sciences consider regularization via one or more penalty functions or constraint sets. When the models/images are not easily described using one or a few penalty functions/constraints, additive model descriptions for regularization lead to better imaging results. These include cartoon-texture decomposition, morphological component analysis, and robust principal component analysis; methods that typically rely on penalty functions. We propose a regularization framework, based on the Minkowski set, that merges the strengths of additive models and constrained formulations. We generalize the Minkowski set, such that the model parameters are the sum of two components, each of which is constrained to an intersection of sets. Furthermore, the sum of the components is also an element of another intersection of sets. These generalizations allow us to include multiple pieces of prior knowledge on each of the components, as well as on the sum of components, which is necessary to ensure physical feasibility of partial-differential-equation based parameters estimation problems. We derive the projection operation onto the generalized Minkowski sets and construct an algorithm based on the alternating direction method of multipliers. We illustrate how we benefit from using more prior knowledge in the form of the generalized Minkowski set using seismic waveform inversion and video background-anomaly separation., Comment: 18 pages, 3 figures