IGU-Aug: Information-Guided Unsupervised Augmentation and Pixel-Wise Contrastive Learning for Medical Image Analysis | IEEE Journals & Magazine | IEEE Xplore

IGU-Aug: Information-Guided Unsupervised Augmentation and Pixel-Wise Contrastive Learning for Medical Image Analysis


Abstract:

Contrastive learning (CL) is a form of self-supervised learning and has been widely used for various tasks. Different from widely studied instance-level contrastive learn...Show More

Abstract:

Contrastive learning (CL) is a form of self-supervised learning and has been widely used for various tasks. Different from widely studied instance-level contrastive learning, pixel-wise contrastive learning mainly helps with pixel-wise dense prediction tasks. The counterpart to an instance in instance-level CL is a pixel, along with its neighboring context, in pixel-wise CL. Aiming to build better feature representation, there is a vast literature about designing instance augmentation strategies for instance-level CL; but there is little similar work on pixel augmentation for pixel-wise CL with a pixel granularity. In this paper, we attempt to bridge this gap. We first classify a pixel into three categories, namely low-, medium-, and high-informative, based on the information quantity the pixel contains. We then adaptively design separate augmentation strategies for each category in terms of augmentation intensity and sampling ratio. Extensive experiments validate that our information-guided pixel augmentation strategy succeeds in encoding more discriminative representations and surpassing other competitive approaches in unsupervised local feature matching. Furthermore, our pretrained model improves the performance of both one-shot and fully supervised models. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose a pixel augmentation method with a pixel granularity for enhancing unsupervised pixel-wise contrastive learning. Code is available at https://github.com/Curli-quan/IGU-Aug.
Published in: IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging ( Volume: 44, Issue: 1, January 2025)
Page(s): 154 - 164
Date of Publication: 01 August 2024

ISSN Information:

PubMed ID: 39088491

Funding Agency:


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