Semantic Aware Data Augmentation for Cell Nuclei Microscopical Images With Artificial Neural Networks

Alireza Naghizadeh, Hongye Xu, Mohab Mohamed, Dimitris N. Metaxas, Dongfang Liu; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021, pp. 3952-3961

There exists many powerful architectures for object detection and semantic segmentation of both biomedical and natural images. However, a difficulty arises in the ability to create training datasets that are large and well-varied. The importance of this subject is nested in the amount of training data that artificial neural networks need to accurately identify and segment objects in images and the infeasibility of acquiring a sufficient dataset within the biomedical field. This paper introduces a new data augmentation method that generates artificial cell nuclei microscopical images along with their correct semantic segmentation labels. Data augmentation provides a step toward accessing higher generalization capabilities of artificial neural networks. An initial set of segmentation objects is used with Greedy AutoAugment to find the strongest performing augmentation policies. The found policies and the initial set of segmentation objects are then used in the creation of the final artificial images. When comparing the state-of-the-art data augmentation methods with the proposed method, the proposed method is shown to consistently outperform current solutions in the generation of nuclei microscopical images.