A Latent Source Model for Patch-Based Image Segmentation

Despite the popularity and empirical success of patch-based nearest-neighbor and weighted majority voting approaches to medical image segmentation, there has been no theoretical development on when, why, and how well these nonparametric methods work. We bridge this gap by providing a theoretical per...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Shah, Devavrat, Chen, George, Golland, Polina
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Format: Article
Language:en_US
Published: Springer International Publishing 2018
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/116080
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0737-3259
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2516-731X
Description
Summary:Despite the popularity and empirical success of patch-based nearest-neighbor and weighted majority voting approaches to medical image segmentation, there has been no theoretical development on when, why, and how well these nonparametric methods work. We bridge this gap by providing a theoretical performance guarantee for nearest-neighbor and weighted majority voting segmentation under a new probabilistic model for patch-based image segmentation. Our analysis relies on a new local property for how similar nearby patches are, and fuses existing lines of work on modeling natural imagery patches and theory for nonparametric classification. We use the model to derive a new patch-based segmentation algorithm that iterates between inferring local label patches and merging these local segmentations to produce a globally consistent image segmentation. Many existing patch-based algorithms arise as special cases of the new algorithm. Keywords: Mixture Model, Image Segmentation, Gaussian Mixture Model, Image Patch, Label Image