Semi-Supervised Skin Lesion Segmentation via Iterative Mask Optimization

Deep learning-based skin lesion segmentation methods have achieved promising results in the community. However, they are usually based on fully supervised learning and require many high-quality ground truths. Labeling the ground truths takes a lot of labor, material, and financial resources. We propose a novel semi-supervised skin lesion segmentation method to solve this problem. First, a hierarchical image segmentation algorithm is used to generate optimal segmentation maps. Then, fully supervised training is performed on a small part of the images with ground truths. The resulting pseudo masks are generated to train the rest of the images. The optimal segmentation maps are utilized in this process to refine the pseudo masks. Experiments show that the proposed method can improve the performance of semi-supervised learning for skin lesion segmentation by reducing the gap with fully supervised learning methods. Moreover, it can reduce the workload of labeling the ground truths. Extensive experiments are conducted on the open dataset to validate the efficiency of the proposed method. The results show that our method is competitive in improving the quality of semi-supervised segmentation.