CFEA: Collaborative Feature Ensembling Adaptation for Domain Adaptation in Unsupervised Optic Disc and Cup Segmentation

TL;DR

This paper introduces CFEA, a novel unsupervised domain adaptation framework that improves retinal optic disc and cup segmentation across different imaging devices by combining adversarial learning and ensembling techniques.

Contribution

CFEA is a new interactive framework that enhances domain-invariant feature extraction and prediction smoothing without requiring target domain annotations.

Findings

Outperforms state-of-the-art methods in retinal segmentation tasks.

Effectively mitigates domain shift in multi-device retinal imaging.

Maintains high segmentation accuracy across diverse datasets.

Abstract

Recently, deep neural networks have demonstrated comparable and even better performance with board-certified ophthalmologists in well-annotated datasets. However, the diversity of retinal imaging devices poses a significant challenge: domain shift, which leads to performance degradation when applying the deep learning models to new testing domains. In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised domain adaptation framework, called Collaborative Feature Ensembling Adaptation (CFEA), to effectively overcome this challenge. Our proposed CFEA is an interactive paradigm which presents an exquisite of collaborative adaptation through both adversarial learning and ensembling weights. In particular, we simultaneously achieve domain-invariance and maintain an exponential moving average of the historical predictions, which achieves a better prediction for the unlabeled data, via ensembling weights during training. Without annotating any sample from the target domain, multiple adversarial losses in encoder and decoder layers guide the extraction of domain-invariant features to confuse the domain classifier and meanwhile benefit the ensembling of smoothing weights. Comprehensive experimental results demonstrate that our CFEA model can overcome performance degradation and outperform the state-of-the-art methods in segmenting retinal optic disc and cup from fundus images. \textit{Code is available at \url{https://github.com/cswin/AWC}}.