Learned Watershed: End-to-End Learning of Seeded Segmentation

Learned boundary maps are known to outperform hand- crafted ones as a basis for the watershed algorithm. We show, for the first time, how to train watershed computation jointly with boundary map prediction. The estimator for the merging priorities is cast as a neural network that is con- volutional (over space) and recurrent (over iterations). The latter allows learning of complex shape priors. The method gives the best known seeded segmentation results on the CREMI segmentation challenge.