Exploring Unbiased Activation Maps for Weakly Supervised Tissue Segmentation of Histopathological Images

Abstract

Tissue segmentation in histopathological images plays a crucial role in computational pathology, owing to its significant potential to indicate the prognosis of cancer patients. Presently, numerous Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation (WSSS) methods strive to utilize image-level labels to achieve pixel-level segmentation, aiming to minimize the need for detailed annotations. Most of these methods rely on Class Activation Maps (CAM) extracted from classification models, frequently leading to poor coverage of objects. The major cause is attributed to the strong inductive bias of the classification model, focusing primarily on discriminative feature of objects, rather than non-discriminative features. Inspired by this, we propose a simple yet effective method that introduces a self-supervised task by exploiting both the discriminative and non-discriminative features, and generate Unbiased Activation Maps (UAM) to encompass the whole object. Specifically, our method entails clustering all spatial features of an object class to derive semantic centers. Each center then works as a spatial filter that amplifies similar feature and suppresses dissimilar feature, and extract high-quality pseudo-labels (some noise at object boundaries). Moreover, we further propose a Noise-Reduced (NR) Learning method to train the segmentation network towards credible signals and lessen the impact of false predictions. Comprehensive experimental results on two public histopathology image datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our method over the state-of-the-art weakly supervised segmentation methods.