PDAM: a panoptic-level feature alignment framework for unsupervised domain adaptive instance segmentation in microscopy images

Dongnan Liu, Donghao Zhang, Yang Song, Fan Zhang, Lauren O'Donnell, Heng Huang, Mei Chen, Weidong Cai

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleResearchpeer-review

63 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

In this work, we present an unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) method, named Panoptic Domain Adaptive Mask R-CNN (PDAM), for unsupervised instance segmentation in microscopy images. Since there currently lack methods particularly for UDA instance segmentation, we first design a Domain Adaptive Mask R-CNN (DAM) as the baseline, with cross-domain feature alignment at the image and instance levels. In addition to the image- and instance-level domain discrepancy, there also exists domain bias at the semantic level in the contextual information. Next, we, therefore, design a semantic segmentation branch with a domain discriminator to bridge the domain gap at the contextual level. By integrating the semantic- and instance-level feature adaptation, our method aligns the cross-domain features at the panoptic level. Third, we propose a task re-weighting mechanism to assign trade-off weights for the detection and segmentation loss functions. The task re-weighting mechanism solves the domain bias issue by alleviating the task learning for some iterations when the features contain source-specific factors. Furthermore, we design a feature similarity maximization mechanism to facilitate instance-level feature adaptation from the perspective of representational learning. Different from the typical feature alignment methods, our feature similarity maximization mechanism separates the domain-invariant and domain-specific features by enlarging their feature distribution dependency. Experimental results on three UDA instance segmentation scenarios with five datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed PDAM method, which outperforms state-of-the-art UDA methods by a large margin.

Original languageEnglish
Article number9195030
Pages (from-to)154-165
Number of pages12
JournalIEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging
Volume40
Issue number1
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Jan 2021
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • instance segmentation
  • microscopy images
  • Unsupervised domain adaptation

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