Feature Preserving Smoothing Provides Simple and Effective Data Augmentation for Medical Image Segmentation

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@INPROCEEDINGS{Sheikh:MICCAI20,
     author = {Sheikh, Rasha and Schultz, Thomas},
      title = {Feature Preserving Smoothing Provides Simple and Effective Data Augmentation for Medical Image
               Segmentation},
  booktitle = {Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI)},
       year = {2020},
  publisher = {Springer},
       note = {Accepted for publication.},
   abstract = {CNNs represent the current state of the art for image classification, as well as for image
               segmentation. Recent work suggests that CNNs for image classification suffer from a bias towards
               texture, and that reducing it can increase the network’s accuracy. We hypothesize that CNNs for
               medical image segmentation might suffer from a similar bias. We propose to reduce it by augmenting
               the training data with feature preserving smoothing, which reduces noise and high-frequency textural
               features, while preserving semantically meaningful boundaries. Experiments on multiple medical image
               segmentation tasks confirm that, especially when limited training data is available or a domain
               shift is involved, feature preserving smoothing can indeed serve as a simple and effective
               augmentation technique.}
}