Size-constraint loss for weakly supervised CNN segmentation

Weak supervision, e.g., in the form of partial labels or image tags, is currently attracting significant attention in CNN segmentation as it can mitigate the lack of full and laborious pixel/voxel annotations, a common problem in medical imaging. Embedding high-order (global) inequality constraints on the network output, for instance, on the size of the target region, can leverage unlabeled data, guiding training with domain-specific knowledge. Inequality constraints are very flexible because they do not assume exact prior knowledge. However, constrained Lagrangian optimization has been largely avoided in deep networks, mainly for computational tractability reasons. To the best of our knowledge, the method of Pathak et al. [17] is the only prior work that addresses constrained deep CNNs in weakly supervised segmentation. It uses the constraints to synthesize fully-labeled training masks (proposals) from weak labels, mimicking full supervision and facilitating dual optimization. We propose to introduce a differentiable term, which enforces inequality constraints directly in the loss function, avoiding expensive Lagrangian dual iterates and proposal generation. From constrained-optimization perspective, our simple approach is not optimal as there is no guarantee that the constraints are satisfied. However, surprisingly, it yields substantially better results than the proposal-based constrained CNNs in [17], while reducing the computational demand for training. In the context of cardiac image segmentation, we reached a segmentation performance close to full supervision while using a fraction of the ground-truth labels (0.1% of the pixels of the ground-truth masks) and image-level tags. Our framework can be easily extended to other inequality constraints, e.g., shape moments [5] or region statistics [8]. Therefore, it has the potential to close the gap between weakly and fully supervised learning in semantic medical image segmentation. Our code is publicly available.