Referring image segmentation (RIS) is a fundamental vision-language task that intends to segment a desired object from an image based on a given natural language expression. Due to the essentially distinct data properties between image and text, most of existing methods either introduce complex designs towards fine-grained vision-language alignment or lack required dense alignment, resulting in scalability issues or mis-segmentation problems such as over- or under-segmentation. To achieve effective and efficient fine-grained feature alignment in the RIS task, we explore the potential of masked multimodal modeling coupled with self-distillation and propose a novel cross-modality masked self-distillation framework named CM-MaskSD, in which our method inherits the transferred knowledge of image-text semantic alignment from CLIP model to realize fine-grained patch-word feature alignment for better segmentation accuracy. Moreover, our CM-MaskSD framework can considerably boost model performance in a nearly parameter-free manner, since it shares weights between the main segmentation branch and the introduced masked self-distillation branches, and solely introduces negligible parameters for coordinating the multimodal features. Comprehensive experiments on three benchmark datasets (ie RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, G-Ref) for the RIS task convincingly demonstrate the superiority of our proposed framework over previous state-of-the-art methods.

Hyperspectral sensors provide an opportunity to capture the intensity of high spatial/spectral information and enable applications for high-level earth observation missions, such as accurate land cover mapping and target/object detection. Currently, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are good at coping with hyperspectral image processing tasks because of the strong spatial and spectral feature extraction ability brought by hierarchical structures, but the convolution operation in CNNs is limited to local feature extraction in both dimensions. In the meanwhile, the introduction of the Transformer structure has provided an opportunity to capture long-distance dependencies between tokens from a global perspective; however, Transformer-based methods have a restricted ability to extract local information because they have no inductive bias, as CNNs do. To make full use of these two methods’ advantages in hyperspectral image processing, a dual-flow architecture named Hyper-LGNet to couple local and global features is firstly proposed by integrating CNN and Transformer branches to deal with HSI spatial-spectral information. In particular, a spatial-spectral feature fusion module (SSFFM) is designed to maximally integrate spectral and spatial information. Three mainstream hyperspectral datasets (Indian Pines, Pavia University and Houston 2013) are utilized to evaluate the proposed method’s performance. Comparative results show that the proposed Hyper-LGNet achieves state-of-the-art performance in comparison with the other nine approaches concerning overall accuracy (OA), average accuracy (AA) and kappa index. Consequently, it is anticipated that, by coupling CNN and Transformer structures, this study can provide novel insights into hyperspectral image analysis.

Transformer, benefiting from global (long-range) information modeling using self-attention mechanism, has been successful in natural language processing and computer vision recently. Convolutional Neural Networks, capable of capturing local features, are difficult to model explicit long-distance dependencies from global feature space. However, both local and global features are crucial for dense prediction tasks, especially for 3D medical image segmentation. In this paper, we present the further attempt to exploit Transformer in 3D CNN for 3D medical image volumetric segmentation and propose a novel network named TransBTSV2 based on the encoder-decoder structure. Different from TransBTS, the proposed TransBTSV2 is not limited to brain tumor segmentation (BTS) but focuses on general medical image segmentation, providing a stronger and more efficient 3D baseline for volumetric segmentation of medical images. As a hybrid CNN-Transformer architecture, TransBTSV2 can achieve accurate segmentation of medical images without any pre-training, possessing the strong inductive bias as CNNs and powerful global context modeling ability as Transformer. With the proposed insight to redesign the internal structure of Transformer block and the introduced Deformable Bottleneck Module to capture shape-aware local details, a highly efficient architecture is achieved with superior performance. Extensive experimental results on four medical image datasets (BraTS 2019, BraTS 2020, LiTS 2017 and KiTS 2019) demonstrate that TransBTSV2 achieves comparable or better results compared to the state-of-the-art methods for the segmentation of brain tumor, liver tumor as well as kidney tumor. Code will be publicly available at https://github.com/Wenxuan-1119/TransBTS.

Transformer, which can benefit from global (long-range) information modeling using self-attention mechanisms, has been successful in natural language processing and 2D image classification recently. However, both local and global features are crucial for dense prediction tasks, especially for 3D medical image segmentation. In this paper, we for the first time exploit Transformer in 3D CNN for MRI Brain Tumor Segmentation and propose a novel network named TransBTS based on the encoder-decoder structure. To capture the local 3D context information, the encoder first utilizes 3D CNN to extract the volumetric spatial feature maps. Meanwhile, the feature maps are reformed elaborately for tokens that are fed into Transformer for global feature modeling. The decoder leverages the features embedded by Transformer and performs progressive upsampling to predict the detailed segmentation map. Extensive experimental results on both BraTS 2019 and 2020 datasets show that TransBTS achieves comparable or higher results than previous state-of-the-art 3D methods for brain tumor segmentation on 3D MRI scans. The source code is available at https://github.com/Wenxuan-1119/TransBTS