Constrained unsupervised anomaly segmentation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel unsupervised anomaly segmentation method that does not require anomalous images for threshold setting, using constrained optimization and entropy maximization to improve performance on brain lesion datasets.

Contribution

It proposes a principled constrained optimization framework with inequality constraints and entropy regularization, eliminating the need for anomalous images in unsupervised anomaly segmentation.

Findings

Outperforms existing methods on brain lesion datasets

Achieves state-of-the-art unsupervised lesion segmentation results

Does not require access to anomalous images for thresholding

Abstract

Current unsupervised anomaly localization approaches rely on generative models to learn the distribution of normal images, which is later used to identify potential anomalous regions derived from errors on the reconstructed images. However, a main limitation of nearly all prior literature is the need of employing anomalous images to set a class-specific threshold to locate the anomalies. This limits their usability in realistic scenarios, where only normal data is typically accessible. Despite this major drawback, only a handful of works have addressed this limitation, by integrating supervision on attention maps during training. In this work, we propose a novel formulation that does not require accessing images with abnormalities to define the threshold. Furthermore, and in contrast to very recent work, the proposed constraint is formulated in a more principled manner, leveraging well-known knowledge in constrained optimization. In particular, the equality constraint on the attention maps in prior work is replaced by an inequality constraint, which allows more flexibility. In addition, to address the limitations of penalty-based functions we employ an extension of the popular log-barrier methods to handle the constraint. Last, we propose an alternative regularization term that maximizes the Shannon entropy of the attention maps, reducing the amount of hyperparameters of the proposed model. Comprehensive experiments on two publicly available datasets on brain lesion segmentation demonstrate that the proposed approach substantially outperforms relevant literature, establishing new state-of-the-art results for unsupervised lesion segmentation, and without the need to access anomalous images.