# Deep Image Segmentation via Discriminant Feature Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.14609 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.14609/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [Masked-attention Mask Transformer for Universal Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01527/) (2021)
- [V-Net: Fully Convolutional Neural Networks for Volumetric Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04797/) (2016)
- [Attention U-Net: Learning Where to Look for the Pancreas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03999/) (2018)
- [U2-Net: Going Deeper with Nested U-Structure for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.09007/) (2020)
- [Cross-Entropy Loss Functions: Theoretical Analysis and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07288/) (2023)
- [Boundary IoU: Improving Object-Centric Image Segmentation Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16562/) (2021)
- [Recurrent Residual Convolutional Neural Network based on U-Net (R2U-Net) for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.06955/) (2018)
- [Bilateral Reference for High-Resolution Dichotomous Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03407/) (2024)
- [Highly Accurate Dichotomous Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03041/) (2022)
- [Loss Functions and Metrics in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.02694/) (2023)
- [DAE-Former: Dual Attention-guided Efficient Transformer for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.13504/) (2022)
- [Deep Linear Discriminant Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.04707/) (2015)
- [Unite-Divide-Unite: Joint Boosting Trunk and Structure for High-accuracy Dichotomous Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14052/) (2023)
- [Robust Wind Turbine Blade Segmentation from RGB Images in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14810/) (2023)
- [Generalized Nested Latent Variable Models for Lossy Coding applied to Wind Turbine Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06165/) (2024)
- [Deep Linear Discriminant Analysis on Fisher Networks: A Hybrid Architecture for Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.01595/) (2016)
- [Dual-Space Augmented Intrinsic-LoRA for Wind Turbine Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.20838/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Accurate image segmentation remains challenging, particularly in generating sharp, confident boundaries. While modern architectures have advanced the field, many of them still rely on standard loss functions like Cross-Entropy and Dice, which often neglect the discriminative structure of learned features, leading to inaccurate boundaries. This work introduces Deep Discriminant Analysis (DDA), a differentiable, architecture-agnostic loss function that embeds classical discriminant principles for network training. DDA explicitly maximizes between-class variance while minimizing within-class one, promoting compact and separable feature distributions without increasing inference cost. Evaluations on the DIS5K benchmark demonstrate that DDA consistently improves segmentation accuracy, boundary sharpness, and model confidence across various architectures. Our results show that integrating discriminant analysis offers a simple, effective path for building more robust segmentation models.