TY - JOUR AU - Upschulte, Eric AU - Harmeling, Stefan AU - Amunts, Katrin AU - Dickscheid, Timo TI - Contour proposal networks for biomedical instance segmentation JO - Medical image analysis VL - 77 SN - 1361-8415 CY - Amsterdam [u.a.] PB - Elsevier Science M1 - FZJ-2022-01559 SP - 102371 - PY - 2022 AB - We present a conceptually simple framework for object instance segmentation, called Contour Proposal Network (CPN), which detects possibly overlapping objects in an image while simultaneously fitting closed object contours using a fixed-size representation based on Fourier Descriptors. The CPN can incorporate state-of-the-art object detection architectures as backbone networks into a single-stage instance segmentation model that can be trained end-to-end. We construct CPN models with different backbone networks and apply them to instance segmentation of cells in datasets from different modalities. In our experiments, CPNs outperform U-Net, Mask R-CNN and StarDist in instance segmentation accuracy. We present variants with execution times suitable for real-time applications. The trained models generalize well across different domains of cell types. Since the main assumption of the framework is closed object contours, it is applicable to a wide range of detection problems also beyond the biomedical domain. An implementation of the model architecture in PyTorch is freely available. LB - PUB:(DE-HGF)16 C6 - 35180674 UR - <Go to ISI:>//WOS:000912927000003 DO - DOI:10.1016/j.media.2022.102371 UR - https://juser.fz-juelich.de/record/906623 ER -