Retinal vessel segmentation is a key step towards the accurate visualization, diagnosis, early treatment and surgery planning of ocular diseases. Recently, deep learning based retinal vessel segmentation methods have reached the state-of-the-art performance. Due to the extreme variations in the morphology of the vessels against the noisy background, these methods still have issues of dealing with small thin vessels, low discriminative ability at the optic disk area, etc. In this paper, we proposed a U-Net-like model with the weighted attention mechanism and the skip connection scheme for addressing these issues. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.

Retinal vessel segmentation is a critical procedure towards the accurate visualization, diagnosis, early treatment and surgery planning of ocular diseases. Recent deep learning-based approaches have achieved impressive performance in retinal vessel segmentation. However, they usually apply global image pre-processing and take the whole retinal images as input during network training, which have two drawbacks for accurate retinal vessel segmentation. First, these methods lack the utilization of the local patch information. Second, they overlook the geometric constraint that retina only occurs in a specific area within the whole image or the extracted patch. As a consequence, these global-based methods suffer in handling details, such as recognizing the small thin vessels, discriminating the optic disk, etc. To address these drawbacks, this study proposes a Global and Local enhanced residual U-nEt (GLUE) for accurate retinal vessel segmentation, which benefits from both the globally and locally enhanced information inside the retinal region. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, which consistently improves the segmentation accuracy over a conventional U-Net and achieves competitive performance compared to the state-of-the-art.

Person re-identification (re-ID) is a challenging instance retrieval problem, especially when identity annotations are not available for training. Although modern deep re-ID approaches have achieved great improvement, it is still difficult to optimize the deep re-ID model and learn discriminative person representation without annotations in training data. To address this challenge, this study considers the problem of unsupervised person re-ID and introduces a novel approach to solve this problem by leveraging virtual and real data. Our approach includes two components: virtual person generation and training of the deep re-ID model. For virtual person generation, we learn a person generation model and a camera style transfer model using unlabeled real data to generate virtual persons with different poses and camera styles. The virtual data is formed as labeled training data, enabling subsequent training deep re-ID model in supervision. For training of the deep re-ID model, we divide it into three steps: 1) pre-training a coarse re-ID model by using virtual data; 2) collaborative filtering based positive pair mining from the real data; and 3) fine-tuning of the coarse re-ID model by leveraging the mined positive pairs and virtual data. The final re-ID model is achieved by iterating between step 2 and step 3 until convergence. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Experimental results on two large-scale datasets, Market-1501 and DukeMTMC-reID, show the advantages of our method over state-of-the-art approaches in unsupervised person re-ID. Our code is now available online ¹ .