Acquiring complementary information about tissue morphology from multimodal medical images is beneficial to clinical disease diagnosis, but it cannot be widely used due to the cost of scans. In such cases, medical image synthesis has become a popular area. Recently, generative adversarial network (GAN) models are applied to many medical image synthesis tasks and show prior performance, since they enable to capture structural details clearly. However, GAN still builds the main framework based on convolutional neural network (CNN) that exhibits a strong locality bias and spatial invariance through the use of shared weights across all positions. Therefore, the long‐range dependencies have been destroyed in this processing. To address this issue, we introduce a double‐scale deep learning method for cross‐modal medical image synthesis. More specifically, the proposed method captures locality feature via local discriminator based on CNN and utilizes long‐range dependencies to learning global feature through global discriminator based on transformer architecture. To evaluate the effectiveness of double‐scale GAN, we conduct folds of experiments on the standard benchmark IXI dataset and experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
7 March 2024 in IEEE Transactions on Image Processing
In this paper, we propose a probabilistic regression diffusion model for head pose estimation, dubbed HeadDiff, which typically addresses the rotation uncertainty, especially when faces are captured in wild conditions. Unlike conventional image-to-pose methods which cannot explicitly establish the rotational manifold of head poses, our HeadDiff aims to ensure the pose rotation via the diffusion process and in parallel, refine the mapping process iteratively. Specifically, we initially formulate the head pose estimation problem as a reverse diffusion process, defining a paradigm for progressive denoising on the manifold, which explores the uncertainty by decomposing the large gap into intermediate steps. Moreover, our HeadDiff is equipped with an isotropic Gaussian distribution by encoding the incoherence information in our rotation representation. Finally, we learn the facial relationship of nearest neighbors with a cycle-consistent constraint for robust pose estimation versus diverse shape variations. Experimental results on multiple datasets demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms existing state-of-the-art techniques without auxiliary data.
We proposes an improved grasshopper algorithm for global optimization problems. Grasshopper optimization algorithm (GOA) is a recently proposed meta-heuristic algorithm inspired by the swarming behavior of grasshoppers. The original GOA has some drawbacks, such as slow convergence speed, easily falling into local optimum, and so on. To overcome these shortcomings, we proposes a grasshopper optimization algorithm based on a logistic Chaos maps opposition-based learning strategy and cloud model inertia weight (CCGOA). CCGOA is divided into three stages. The chaos opposition learning initialization strategy is used to initialize the population, so that the population can be evenly distributed in the feasible solution space as much as possible, so as to improve the uniformity and diversity of the initial population distribution of the grasshopper algorithm. The inertia weight cloud model is introduced into the grasshopper algorithm, and different inertia weight strategies are used to adjust the convergence speed of the algorithm. Based on the principle of chaotic logistic maps, local depth search is carried out to reduce the probability of falling into local optimum. Fourteen benchmark functions and an engineering example are used for simulation verification. Experimental results show that the proposed CCGOA algorithm has superior performance in determining the optimal solution of the test function problem.
7 March 2024 in IEEE Transactions on Image Processing
Face aging tasks aim to simulate changes in the appearance of faces over time. However, due to the lack of data on different ages under the same identity, existing models are commonly trained using mapping between age groups. This makes it difficult for most existing aging methods to accurately capture the correspondence between individual identities and aging features, leading to generating faces that do not match the real aging appearance. In this paper, we re-annotate the CACD2000 dataset and propose a consensus-agent deep reinforcement learning method to solve the aforementioned problem. Specifically, we define two agents, the aging process agent and the aging personalization agent, and model the task of matching aging features as a Markov decision process. The aging process agent simulates the aging process of an individual, while the aging personalization agent calculates the difference between the aging appearance of an individual and the average aging appearance. The two agents iteratively adjust the matching degree between the target aging feature and the current identity through a form of synergistic cooperation. Extensive experimental results on four face aging datasets show that our model achieves convincing performance compared to the current state-of-the-art methods.
The segmentation of optic disc (OD) and optic cup (OC) are used in the automatic diagnosis of glaucoma. However, the spatially ambiguous boundary and semantically uncertain region-of-interest area in pictures may lead to the degradation of the performance of precise segmentation of the OC and OD. Unlike most existing methods, including the variants of CNNs (Convolutional Neural Networks) and U-Net, which limit the contributions of rich global features, we instead propose a hybrid CNN-transformer and polar transformation network, dubbed as Polarformer, which aims to extract discriminative and semantic features for robust OD and OC segmentation. Our Polarformer typically exploits contextualized features among all input units and models the correlation of structural relationships under the paradigm of the transformer backbone. More specifically, our learnable polar transformer module optimizes the polar transformations by sampling images in the Cartesian space and then mapping them back to the polar coordinate system for masked-image reconstruction. Extensive experimental results present that our Polarformer achieves superior performance in comparison to most state-of-the-art methods on three publicly available datasets.
In this paper, we propose a Siamese graph learning (SGL) approach to alleviate aging dataset bias. While numerous semi-supervised algorithms have been successfully applied to classification tasks, most of them assume that both the labeled and unlabeled samples are drawn from identical distributions. However, this assumption may not hold due to the heterogeneity of face aging data, which gives rise to a bias and unpromising prediction. Motivated by this, our SGL learns to align the sparse distribution with the dense one for dataset debias with preserving the real aging smoothness. To achieve this, we adopt a mixup strategy to plausibly generate hallucinatory samples, which leverages amounts of unlabeled data to enhance the diversity of unbalanced classes. Moreover, we develop a graph contrastive regularization to suppress the noise introduced by auxiliary unlabeled samples. Extensive experimental results show compelling performance by only utilizing the limited scalability of training annotations.