Working memory inspired hierarchical video decomposition with transformative representations

Abstract

Video decomposition is very important to extract moving foreground objects from complex backgrounds in computer vision, machine learning, and medical imaging, e.g., extracting moving contrast-filled vessels from the complex and noisy backgrounds of X-ray coronary angiography (XCA). However, the challenges caused by dynamic backgrounds, overlapping heterogeneous environments and complex noises still exist in video decomposition. To solve these challenges, this study is the first to introduce a flexible visual working memory model in video decomposition to provide interpretable and high-performance hierarchical deep learning architecture, integrating the transformative representations between sensory and control layers from the perspective of visual and cognitive neuroscience. Specifically, robust PCA unrolling networks acting as a structure-regularized sensor layer decompose XCA into sparse/low-rank structured representations to separate moving contrast-filled vessels from noisy and complex backgrounds. Then, patch recurrent convolutional LSTM networks with a backprojection superresolution module embody unstructured random representations of the control layer in working memory, recurrently projecting spatiotemporally decomposed nonlocal patches into orthogonal subspaces for heterogeneous vessel retrieval and interference suppression. This video decomposition architecture effectively restores the heterogeneous profiles of intensity and geometry of moving objects against the complex background interferences. Experiments show that the proposed method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in accurate moving contrast-filled vessel extraction with excellent flexibility and computational efficiency.