WDA-Net: Weakly-Supervised Domain Adaptive Segmentation of Electron Microscopy

Abstract: Accurate segmentation of organelle instances, e.g., mitochondria, is essential for electron microscopy analysis. Despite the outstanding performance of fully supervised methods, they highly rely on sufficient per-pixel annotated data and are sensitive to domain shift. Aiming to develop a highly annotation-efficient approach with competitive performance, we focus on weakly-supervised domain adaptation (WDA) with a type of extremely sparse and weak annotation demanding minimal annotation efforts, i.e., sparse point annotations on only a small subset of object instances. To reduce performance degradation arising from domain shift, we explore multi-level transferable knowledge through conducting three complementary tasks, i.e., counting, detection, and segmentation, constituting a task pyramid with different levels of domain invariance. The intuition behind this is that after investigating a related source domain, it is much easier to spot similar objects in the target domain than to delineate their fine boundaries. Specifically, we enforce counting estimation as a global constraint to the detection with sparse supervision, which further guides the segmentation. A cross-position cut-and-paste augmentation is introduced to further compensate for the annotation sparsity. Extensive validations show that our model with only 15% point annotations can achieve comparable performance as supervised models and shows robustness to annotation selection.