Weakly supervised skin lesion segmentation based on spot-seeds guided optimal regions

Abstract

Automatic skin lesion segmentation is the most critical and relevant task in computer-aided skin cancer diagnosis. Methods based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are mainly used in current skin lesion segmentation. The requirement of huge pixel-level labels is a significant obstacle to achieve semantic segmentation of skin lesion by CNNs. In this paper, a novel weakly supervised framework for skin lesion segmentation is presented, which generates high-quality pixel-level annotations and optimizes the segmentation network. A hierarchical image segmentation algorithm can predict a boundary map for training images. Then, the optimal regions of candidate hierarchical levels are selected. Afterward, Superpixels-CRF built on the optimal regions is guided by spot seeds to propagate information from spot seeds to unlabeled regions, resulting in high-quality pixel-level annotations. Using these high-quality pixel-level annotations, a segmentation network can be trained and segmentation masks can be predicted. To iteratively optimize the segmentation network, the predicted segmentation masks are refined and the segmentation network are retrained. Comparative experiments demonstrate that the proposed segmentation framework reduces the gap between weakly and fully supervised skin lesion segmentation methods, and achieves state-of-the-art performance while reducing human labeling efforts.