Synergy Between Semantic Segmentation and Image Denoising via Alternate Boosting

Abstract

The capability of image semantic segmentation may be deteriorated due to noisy input image, where image denoising prior to segmentation helps. Both image denoising and semantic segmentation have been developed significantly with the advance of deep learning. Thus, we are interested in the synergy between them by using a holistic deep model. We observe that not only denoising helps combat the drop of segmentation accuracy due to noise, but also pixel-wise semantic information boosts the capability of denoising. We then propose a boosting network to perform denoising and segmentation alternately. The proposed network is composed of multiple segmentation and denoising blocks (SDBs), each of which estimates semantic map then uses the map to regularize denoising. Experimental results show that the denoised image quality is improved substantially and the segmentation accuracy is improved to close to that of clean images. Our code and models will be made publicly available.

FECC-Net: A Novel Feature Enhancement and Context Capture Network Based on Brain MRI Images for Lesion Segmentation

“…It can be observed that the noise still interferes with the deep learning model, especially for targets that are difficult to focus on with the naked eye. Therefore, some works combine semantic segmentation and image denoising to achieve high-precision semantic information classification [ 44 ]. We plan to apply related ideas to brain MRI segmentation in future work.…”