Weighted Mask R-CNN for Improving Adjacent Boundary Segmentation

In the recent era of AI, instance segmentation has significantly advanced boundary and object detection especially in diverse fields (e.g., biological and environmental research). Despite its progress, edge detection amid adjacent objects (e.g., organism cells) still remains intractable. This is because homogeneous and heterogeneous objects are prone to being mingled in a single image. To cope with this challenge, we propose the weighted Mask R-CNN designed to effectively separate overlapped objects in virtue of extra weights to adjacent boundaries. For numerical study, a range of experiments are performed with applications to simulated data and real data (e.g., Microcystis, one of the most common algae genera and cell membrane images). It is noticeable that the weighted Mask R-CNN outperforms the standard Mask R-CNN, given that the analytic experiments show on average 92.5% of precision and 96.4% of recall in algae data and 94.5% of precision and 98.6% of recall in cell membrane data. Consequently, we found that a majority of sample boundaries in real and simulated data are precisely segmented in the midst of object mixtures.

Automated summary

The study introduces the weighted Mask R-CNN to effectively separate overlapped objects, which outperforms the standard Mask R-CNN with high precision and recall rates, especially in algae data and cell membrane data.