Constrained Domain Adaptation for Segmentation

Mathilde Bateson, Hoel Kervadec, Jose Dolz, Hervé Lombaert, Ismail Ben Ayed

Abstract: We propose to adapt segmentation networks with a constrained formulation, which embeds domain-invariant prior knowledge about the segmentation regions. Such knowledge may take the form of simple anatomical information, e.g., structure size or shape, estimated from source samples or known a priori. Our method imposes domain-invariant inequality constraints on a network output of unlabeled target samples. It implicitly matches prediction statistics between target and source domains with permitted uncertainty of prior knowledge. We address our constrained problem with a differentiable penalty, fully suited for conventional gradient descent approaches, removing the need for computationally expensive Lagrangian optimization with dual projections. Unlike current two-step adversarial training, our formulation is based on a single loss in a single network, which simplifies adaptation by avoiding extra adversarial steps, while improving convergence and quality of training. The comparison of our approach with state-of-the-art adversarial methods reveals substantially better performance on the challenging task of adapting spine segmentation across different MRI modalities. Our results also show a robustness to imprecision of size priors, approaching the accuracy of a fully supervised model trained directly in a target domain. Our method can be readily used for various constraints and segmentation problems.