A study in the effects of stroke radius on semi-automatic image segmentation

This is the code for a study that was aimed at determining if the width of strokes in a label image
had significant impact on the resulting segmentation’s accuracy and reproducibility.

Study data

The data from this study comes from two previous studies, run by Steven Rau and Yuanxia Li. These
studies used images from the Berkeley Segmentation Data Set and Benchmarks 500 image set. They then
created label images for where participants labeled given areas of the image as foreground or background.
These label images are then used by semi-automatic image segmentation algorithms (as seed points)
to assist with segmentation. One study used points in addition to strokes.

The study data must be downloaded separately (due to being large and having many files). See the
releases in this repo to download.

A glance at results

Original

Stroke image

Segmentation without dilation (DSC = 0.912615)

Segmentation of radius 4 dilation (DSC = 0.949465)

Explaining this repo

The files in this repo require some explanation, as there’s no obvious point to dive in. The files
are mostly stand alone scripts that each perform a specialized task. These can be run sequentially
to build up all the data and results of the study, but there’s some caveats.

dilate.py: This script contains the functionality to dilate a single image. There’s two methods
of dilation. One is straightforward and the other avoid introducing new errors over the ground truth.
Which is arguably cheat-y since it requires knowing the ground truth, but it’s used with the assumption
that users would be less likely to make such mistakes if they could visually see the dilation.
run_dilation.py: This file dilates all the label images, creating new images for each dilation
radius. The output folders for this need to exist. This won’t overwrite files, so if you need to start
from scratch, delete the old output files.
segment.py: This file runs the segmentation programs (located in the segmentation_programs
folder) on all dilated images, producing a binary segmentated image for each dilated label image.
This file has a catch, and that’s that one segmentation program is a Linux binary and the other is
a Windows binary. Hence, the script has a switch to flip depending on which segmentation program you
want to run. This also means you’d have to run this on two different OSes to get all the files. This
can take a while to run. The output folders for this need to exist. This also doesn’t overwrite files.
Note the hardcoded foreground label of 29 and background label of 149.
analysis.py: This script performs an analysis of Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) and
Generalized Tanimoto Coefficient (GTC) for each image. This measures accuracy and reproducibility of
segmentation, respectively. The input and output folders need to exist (but need not contain files).
The results are placed in the analysis folder (which will be created if it doesn’t already exist).
This is the only output that isn’t placed with the data, as it’s tab delimited files and not images.
stats.py: This script interprets the analysis files and comes up with various statistics, including
the means and medians of measures for each study, Wilicoxon test, normality test, and Friedman chi
test. The result is printed to the console.

The image data folders

Not in this repo, but included with the releases is the image data, which has a certain organization.
Firstly, things are divided into the rau and yuanxia folders, splitting by study.

rau/originals - colour originals (as JPG)
rau/ground_truth - binary ground truths (as PNG)
rau/points - User label images where the user entered points (as TIF)
rau/strokes - User label images where the user entered strokes (as TIF)
rau/dilated_points - The dilated versions of the files in rau/points (rest as PNG)
rau/dilated_strokes - The dilated versions of the files in rau/strokes
rau/segmented_points - The Boykov segmented versions of the files in rau/dilated_points
rau/segmented_strokes - The Boykov segmented versions of the files in rau/dilated_strokes
rau/segmented_points_onecut - The OneCut segmented versions of the files in rau/dilated_points
rau/segmented_strokes_onecut - The OneCut segmented versions of the files in rau/dilated_strokes
yuanxia/originals - colour originals (as JPG)
yuanxia/ground_truth - binary ground truths (as PNG)
yuanxia/points - User label images where the user entered points (as PNG)
yuanxia/dilated - The dilated versions of the files in yuanxia/points (rest as PNG)
yuanxia/segmented - The Boykov segmented versions of the files in rau/dilated
yuanxia/segmented_onecut - The OneCut segmented versions of the files in rau/dilated

These folders also have scripts that were used to move the files into the structures from the format
they were provided in from Dr Mark Eramian (that is, from the format the study authors had them in).
The files have a consistent and flat naming scheme:

<user id>-<file id>-<time pressure>-<dilation radius>-<type>.png

<user id> - A numeric ID given to the user. Note that not all user IDs were used.
<file id> - The ID of the file in the BSDS 500.
<time pressure> - Number of seconds that users had to complete the segmentation. Only used in
the Yuanxia study.
<dilation radius> - The radius, in pixels, that the image was dilated.
<type> - An internal classification of the type of the image, such as point, segmented, dilate,
etc.

Attributes are excluded where they don’t exist. Eg, a dilated image in the Rau study might have a file
name like 1-6046-3-dilate.png. That fits the pattern <user id>-<file id>-<dilation radius>-<type>.png.
The originals just have a file ID. Ground truths are named <file id>-GT.png. These IDs are used
consistently throughout the study.

Segmentation programs

This study uses two segmentation programs. One which was created by Dr Mark Eramian utilizing a
graph cut algorithm from Boykov. The other
algorithm utilizes the One Cut Algorithm implemented by Lena Gorelick.
That executable is actually a modified version of my own.

Licensing

The images are all public domain. The segmentation programs have their own licenses that must be
considered separately. Finally, the various python files are my work and licensed under the
BSD license:

Copyright (c) 2017, Katrina Hoffert
All rights reserved.
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:
1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this
   list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice,
   this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation
   and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS "AS IS" AND
ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED
WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE
DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT OWNER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR
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