StripNet: Towards Topology Consistent Strip Structure Segmentation

In this work, we propose to study a special semantic segmentation problem where the targets are long and continuous strip patterns. Strip patterns widely exist in medical images and natural photos, such as retinal layers in OCT images and lanes on the roads, and segmentation of them has practical significance. Traditional pixel-level segmentation methods largely ignore the structure prior of strip patterns and thus easily suffer from the topological inconformity problem, such as holes and isolated islands in segmentation results. To tackle this problem, we design a novel deep framework, StripNet, that leverages the strong end-to-end learning ability of CNNs to predict the structured outputs as a sequence of boundary locations of the target strips. Specifically, StripNet decomposes the original segmentation problem into more easily solved local boundary-regression problems, and takes account of the topological constraints on the predicted boundaries. Moreover, our framework adopts a coarse-to-fine strategy and uses carefully designed heatmaps for training the boundary localization network. We examine StripNet on two challenging strip pattern segmentation tasks, retinal layer segmentation and lane detection. Extensive experiments demonstrate that StripNet achieves excellent results and outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both tasks.