HighlightsThis work presents the methodologies and evaluation results for the WHS algorithms selected from the submissions to the Multi-Modality Whole Heart Segmentation (MM-WHS) challenge, in conjunction with MICCAI 2017.This work introduces the related information to the challenge, discusses the results from the conventional methods and deep learning-based algorithms, and provides insights to the future research.The challenge provides a fair and intuitive comparison framework for methods developed and being developed for WHS.The challenge provides the training datasets with manually delineated ground truths and evaluation for an ongoing development of MM-WHS algorithms.

Deep convolutional networks (ConvNets) have achieved unprecedented performances on many computer vision tasks. However, their adaptations to crowd counting on single images are still in their infancy and suffer from severe over-fitting. Here we propose a new learning strategy to produce generalizable features by way of deep negative correlation learning (NCL). More specifically, we deeply learn a pool of decorrelated regressors with sound generalization capabilities through managing their intrinsic diversities. Our proposed method, named decorrelated Con-vNet (D-ConvNet), is end-to-end-trainable and independent of the backbone fully-convolutional network architectures. Extensive experiments on very deep VGGNet as well as our customized network structure indicate the superiority of D-ConvNet when compared with several state-ofthe-art methods. Our implementation will be released at https://github.com/shizenglin/Deep-NCL * This work was done during Zenglin Shi's internship at ADSC.

This paper aims to count arbitrary objects in images. The leading counting approaches start from point annotations per object from which they construct density maps. Then, their training objective transforms input images to density maps through deep convolutional networks. We posit that the point annotations serve more supervision purposes than just constructing density maps. We introduce ways to repurpose the points for free. First, we propose supervised focus from segmentation, where points are converted into binary maps. The binary maps are combined with a network branch and accompanying loss function to focus on areas of interest. Second, we propose supervised focus from global density, where the ratio of point annotations to image pixels is used in another branch to regularize the overall density estimation. To assist both the density estimation and the focus from segmentation, we also introduce an improved kernel size estimator for the point annotations. Experiments on six datasets show that all our contributions reduce the counting error, regardless of the base network, resulting in state-of-the-art accuracy using only a single network. Finally, we are the first to count on WIDER FACE, allowing us to show the benefits of our approach in handling varying object scales and crowding levels. Code is available at https://github.com/shizenglin/ Counting-with-Focus-for-Free

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Nonlinear regression has been extensively employed in many computer vision problems (e.g., crowd counting, age estimation, affective computing). Under the umbrella of deep learning, two common solutions exist i) transforming nonlinear regression to a robust loss function which is jointly optimizable with the deep convolutional network, and ii) utilizing ensemble of deep networks. Although some improved performance is achieved, the former may be lacking due to the intrinsic limitation of choosing a single hypothesis and the latter usually suffers from much larger computational complexity. To cope with those issues, we propose to regress via an efficient "divide and conquer" manner. The core of our approach is the generalization of negative correlation learning that has been shown, both theoretically and empirically, to work well for non-deep regression problems. Without extra parameters, the proposed method controls the bias-variance-covariance trade-off systematically and usually yields a deep regression ensemble where each base model is both "accurate" and "diversified." Moreover, we show that each sub-problem in the proposed method has less Rademacher Complexity and thus is easier to optimize. Extensive experiments on several diverse and challenging tasks including crowd counting, personality analysis, age estimation, and image super-resolution demonstrate the superiority over challenging baselines as well as the versatility of the proposed method.