2021/04/07 by Eric Upschulte, Upschulte, Eric, Stefan Harmeling +5 · 2 citations
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Computer Science · #AI in cancer detection #Cell Image Analysis Techniques #Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) #Digital Imaging for Blood Diseases #FOS: Computer and information sciences #cs.CV
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2104.03393
arxiv created 2021/04/07 · openalex publication_date 2021/04/07 · arxiv updated 2021/04/09 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We present a conceptually simple framework for object instance segmentation called Contour Proposal Network (CPN), which detects possibly overlapping objects in an image while simultaneously fitting closed object contours using an interpretable, fixed-sized representation based on Fourier Descriptors. The CPN can incorporate state of the art object detection architectures as backbone networks into a single-stage instance segmentation model that can be trained end-to-end. We construct CPN models with different backbone networks, and apply them to instance segmentation of cells in datasets from different modalities. In our experiments, we show CPNs that outperform U-Nets and Mask R-CNNs in instance segmentation accuracy, and present variants with execution times suitable for real-time applications. The trained models generalize well across different domains of cell types. Since the main assumption of the framework are closed object contours, it is applicable to a wide range of detection problems also outside the biomedical domain. An implementation of the model architecture in PyTorch is freely available.