# Deep ContourFlow: Advancing Active Contours with Deep Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.10696 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10696/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.00868/) (2018)
- [Skin Lesion Analysis Toward Melanoma Detection 2018: A Challenge Hosted by the International Skin Imaging Collaboration (ISIC)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.03368/) (2019)
- [One-Shot Learning for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.03410/) (2017)
- [Prior Guided Feature Enrichment Network for Few-Shot Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.01449/) (2020)
- [DatasetGAN: Efficient Labeled Data Factory with Minimal Human Effort](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06490/) (2021)
- [CANet: Class-Agnostic Segmentation Networks with Iterative Refinement and Attentive Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.02351/) (2019)
- [SG-One: Similarity Guidance Network for One-Shot Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.09091/) (2018)
- [Efficient Interactive Annotation of Segmentation Datasets with Polygon-RNN++](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09693/) (2018)
- [Deep Snake for Real-Time Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.01629/) (2020)
- [Annotating Object Instances with a Polygon-RNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05548/) (2017)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Image Segmentation Based on Differentiable Feature Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09990/) (2020)
- [Labels4Free: Unsupervised Segmentation using StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14968/) (2021)
- [One-Shot Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11507/) (2018)
- [End-to-End Trainable Deep Active Contour Models for Automated Image Segmentation: Delineating Buildings in Aerial Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11691/) (2020)
- [Deep Clustering with Features from Self-Supervised Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.13364/) (2022)
- [GANORCON: Are Generative Models Useful for Few-shot Segmentation?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00854/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper introduces a novel approach that combines unsupervised active contour models with deep learning for robust and adaptive image segmentation. Indeed, traditional active contours, provide a flexible framework for contour evolution and learning offers the capacity to learn intricate features and patterns directly from raw data. Our proposed methodology leverages the strengths of both paradigms, presenting a framework for both unsupervised and one-shot approaches for image segmentation. It is capable of capturing complex object boundaries without the need for extensive labeled training data. This is particularly required in histology, a field facing a significant shortage of annotations due to the challenging and time-consuming nature of the annotation process. We illustrate and compare our results to state of the art methods on a histology dataset and show significant improvements.