Vision based depth estimation plays a significant role in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) because of its low cost and high efficiency, which can be used to analyze driving environment, improve driving safety, etc. Although recently proposed approaches abandon time consuming pre-processing or postprocessing steps and achieve an end-to-end prediction manner, fine details may be lost through max-pooling based encode modules. To tackle this problem, we propose Multi-Scale Dilated Convolution Network (MSDC-Net), a dilated convolution based deep network. For the feature encoding and decoding part, dilated layers maintain the scale of original image and reduce lost details. After that, a pyramid dilated feature extraction module is added to integrate the knowledge learned through forward steps with different receptive fields. The proposed approach is evaluated on KITTI dataset, and achieves a state-of-the-art result on the dataset.

Neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1) is an autosomal dominant tumor predisposition syndrome that involves the central and peripheral nervous systems. Accurate detection and segmentation of neurofibromas are essential for assessing tumor burden and longitudinal tumor size changes. Automatic convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are sensitive and vulnerable as tumors’ variable anatomical location and heterogeneous appearance on MRI. In this study, wepropose deep interactive networks (DINs) to address the above limitations. User interactions guide the model to recognize complicated tumors and quickly adapt to heterogeneous tumors. We introduce a simple but effective Exponential Distance Transform (ExpDT) that converts user interactions into guide maps regarded as the spatial and appearance prior. Comparing with popular Euclidean and geodesic distances, ExpDT is more robust to various image sizes, which reserves the distribution of interactive inputs. Furthermore, to enhance the tumor-related features, we design a deep interactive module to propagate the guides into deeper layers. We train and evaluate DINs on three MRI data sets from NF1 patients. The experiment results yield significant improvements of 44% and 14% in DSC comparing with automated and other interactive methods, respectively. We also experimentally demonstrate the efficiency of DINs in reducing user burden when comparing with conventional interactive methods.