# OOD-SEG: Exploiting out-of-distribution detection techniques for learning image segmentation from sparse multi-class positive-only annotations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.09553 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.09553/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 38 of its 69 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Nov 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [On Calibration of Modern Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04599/) (2017)
- [Dropout as a Bayesian Approximation: Representing Model Uncertainty in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02142/) (2015)
- [Simple and Scalable Predictive Uncertainty Estimation using Deep Ensembles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01474/) (2016)
- [A Baseline for Detecting Misclassified and Out-of-Distribution Examples in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02136/) (2016)
- [Concrete Problems in AI Safety](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.06565/) (2016)
- [A Simple Unified Framework for Detecting Out-of-Distribution Samples and Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03888/) (2018)
- [Enhancing The Reliability of Out-of-distribution Image Detection in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02690/) (2017)
- [Generalized Out-of-Distribution Detection: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.11334/) (2021)
- [Generalized ODIN: Detecting Out-of-distribution Image without Learning from Out-of-distribution Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.11297/) (2020)
- [Aleatoric uncertainty estimation with test-time augmentation for medical image segmentation with convolutional neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.07356/) (2018)
- [Embracing Imperfect Datasets: A Review of Deep Learning Solutions for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10454/) (2019)
- [Learning from positive and unlabeled data: a survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.04820/) (2018)
- [The One Hundred Layers Tiramisu: Fully Convolutional DenseNets for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09326/) (2016)
- [Interactive Medical Image Segmentation using Deep Learning with Image-specific Fine-tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.04043/) (2017)
- [DeepIGeoS: A Deep Interactive Geodesic Framework for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.00652/) (2017)
- [Trustworthy clinical AI solutions: a unified review of uncertainty quantification in deep learning models for medical image analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03736/) (2022)
- [Learning to Segment Medical Images with Scribble-Supervision Alone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.04668/) (2018)
- [One-Class Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08688/) (2019)
- [Improved Trainable Calibration Method for Neural Networks on Medical Imaging Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.04057/) (2020)
- [One-Class Classification: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.03064/) (2021)
- [Inter Extreme Points Geodesics for End-to-End Weakly Supervised Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00583/) (2021)
- [Bounding Box Tightness Prior for Weakly Supervised Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00934/) (2021)
- [COSST: Multi-organ Segmentation with Partially Labeled Datasets Using Comprehensive Supervisions and Self-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14030/) (2023)
- [Trends in deep learning for medical hyperspectral image analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13974/) (2020)
- [A Spectral-Spatial-Dependent Global Learning Framework for Insufficient and Imbalanced Hyperspectral Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14327/) (2021)
- [Label-set Loss Functions for Partial Supervision: Application to Fetal Brain 3D MRI Parcellation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03846/) (2021)
- [Hyperspectral Image Segmentation: A Preliminary Study on the Oral and Dental Spectral Image Database (ODSI-DB)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08252/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Label tree semantic losses for rich multi-class medical image segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.15777/) (2025)
- [Toxicity Assessment in Preclinical Histopathology via Class-Aware Mahalanobis Distance for Known and Novel Anomalies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.02124/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Despite significant advancements, segmentation based on deep neural networks in medical and surgical imaging faces several challenges, two of which we aim to address in this work. First, acquiring complete pixel-level segmentation labels for medical images is time-consuming and requires domain expertise. Second, typical segmentation pipelines cannot detect out-of-distribution (OOD) pixels, leaving them prone to spurious outputs during deployment. In this work, we propose a novel segmentation approach which broadly falls within the positive-unlabelled (PU) learning paradigm and exploits tools from OOD detection techniques. Our framework learns only from sparsely annotated pixels from multiple positive-only classes and does not use any annotation for the background class. These multi-class positive annotations naturally fall within the in-distribution (ID) set. Unlabelled pixels may contain positive classes but also negative ones, including what is typically referred to as background in standard segmentation formulations. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to formulate multi-class segmentation with sparse positive-only annotations as a pixel-wise PU learning problem and to address it using OOD detection techniques. Here, we forgo the need for background annotation and consider these together with any other unseen classes as part of the OOD set. Our framework can integrate, at a pixel-level, any OOD detection approaches designed for classification tasks. To address the lack of existing OOD datasets and established evaluation metric for medical image segmentation, we propose a cross-validation strategy that treats held-out labelled classes as OOD. Extensive experiments on both multi-class hyperspectral and RGB surgical imaging datasets demonstrate the robustness and generalisation capability of our proposed framework.