Learning Probabilistic Topological Representations Using Discrete Morse Theory

Abstract: Accurate delineation of fine-scale structures is a very important yet challenging problem. Existing methods use topological information as an additional training loss, but are ultimately making pixel-wise predictions. In this paper, we propose the first deep learning-based method to learn topological/structural representations. We use discrete Morse theory and persistent homology to construct an one-parameter family of structures as the topological/structural representation space. Furthermore, we learn a probabilistic model that can perform inference tasks in such a topological/structural representation space. Our method generates true structures rather than pixel-maps, leading to better topological integrity in automatic segmentation tasks. It also facilitates semi-automatic interactive annotation/proofreading via the sampling of structures and structure-aware uncertainty.
Hu, Xiaoling, Dimitris Samaras, and Chao Chen. 2022. “Learning Probabilistic Topological Representations Using Discrete Morse Theory.” arXiv [eess.IV]. arXiv. http://arxiv.org/abs/2206.01742.