Topograph: An Efficient Graph-Based Framework for Strictly Topology Preserving Image Segmentation

Laurin Lux, Alexander H Berger, Alexander Weers, Nico Stucki, Daniel Rueckert, Ulrich Bauer, Johannes C. Paetzold

Keywords: Image Segmentation, Topology, Graph

TL;DR: A novel metric and loss function based on component graphs for topology preserving image segmentation.

Abstract:

Topological correctness plays a critical role in many image segmentation tasks, yet most networks are trained using pixel-wise loss functions, such as Dice, neglecting topological accuracy. Existing topology-aware methods often lack robust topological guarantees, are limited to specific use cases, or impose high computational costs.
In this work, we propose a novel, graph-based framework for topologically accurate image segmentation that is both computationally efficient and generally applicable. Our method constructs a component graph that fully encodes the topological information of both the prediction and ground truth, allowing us to efficiently identify topologically critical regions and aggregate a loss based on local neighborhood information. Furthermore, we introduce a strict topological metric capturing the homotopy equivalence between the union and intersection of prediction-label pairs. We formally prove the topological guarantees of our approach and empirically validate its effectiveness on binary and multi-class datasets, demonstrating state-of-the-art performance with up to fivefold faster loss computation compared to persistent homology methods.

Primary Area: learning on graphs and other geometries & topologies

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Submission Number: 3773