A Randomized Ensemble Approach to Industrial CT Segmentation

Abstract

Tuning the models and parameters of common segmentation approaches is challenging especially in the presence of noise and artifacts. Ensemble-based techniques attempt to compensate by randomly varying models and/or parameters to create a diverse set of hypotheses, which are subsequently ranked to arrive at the best solution. However, these methods have been restricted to cases where the underlying models are well-established, e.g. natural images. In practice, it is difficult to determine a suitable base-model and the amount of randomization required. Furthermore, for multi-object scenes no single hypothesis may perform well for all objects, reducing the overall quality of the results. This paper presents a new ensemble-based segmentation framework for industrial CT images demonstrating that comparatively simple models and randomization strategies can significantly improve the result over existing techniques. Furthermore, we introduce a per-object based ranking, followed by a consensus inference that can outperform even the best case scenario of existing hypothesis ranking approaches. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach using a set of noise and artifact rich CT images from baggage security and show that it significantly outperforms existing solutions in this area.