Paper ID: 2208.03142

BoxShrink: From Bounding Boxes to Segmentation Masks

Michael Gröger, Vadim Borisov, Gjergji Kasneci

One of the core challenges facing the medical image computing community is fast and efficient data sample labeling. Obtaining fine-grained labels for segmentation is particularly demanding since it is expensive, time-consuming, and requires sophisticated tools. On the contrary, applying bounding boxes is fast and takes significantly less time than fine-grained labeling, but does not produce detailed results. In response, we propose a novel framework for weakly-supervised tasks with the rapid and robust transformation of bounding boxes into segmentation masks without training any machine learning model, coined BoxShrink. The proposed framework comes in two variants - rapid-BoxShrink for fast label transformations, and robust-BoxShrink for more precise label transformations. An average of four percent improvement in IoU is found across several models when being trained using BoxShrink in a weakly-supervised setting, compared to using only bounding box annotations as inputs on a colonoscopy image data set. We open-sourced the code for the proposed framework and published it online.

Submitted: Aug 5, 2022