Facial wrinkle segmentation using weighted deep supervision and semi-automatic labeling

Facial wrinkles are important indicators of human aging. Recently, a method using deep learning and a semi-automatic labeling was proposed to segment facial wrinkles, which showed much better performance than conventional image-processing-based methods. However, the difficulty of wrinkle segmentation remains challenging due to the thinness of wrinkles and their small proportion in the entire image. Therefore, performance improvement in wrinkle segmentation is still necessary. To address this issue, we propose a novel loss function that takes into account the thickness of wrinkles based on the semi-automatic labeling approach. First, considering the different spatial dimensions of the decoder in the U-Net architecture, we generated weighted wrinkle maps from ground truth. These weighted wrinkle maps were used to calculate the training losses more accurately than the existing deep supervision approach. This new loss computation approach is defined as weighted deep supervision in our study. The proposed method was evaluated using an image dataset obtained from a professional skin analysis device and labeled using semi-automatic labeling. In our experiment, the proposed weighted deep supervision showed higher Jaccard Similarity Index (JSI) performance for wrinkle segmentation compared to conventional deep supervision and traditional image processing methods. Additionally, we conducted experiments on the labeling using a semi-automatic labeling approach, which had not been explored in previous research, and compared it with human labeling. The semi-automatic labeling technology showed more consistent wrinkle labels than human-made labels. Furthermore, to assess the scalability of the proposed method to other domains, we applied it to retinal vessel segmentation. The results demonstrated superior performance of the proposed method compared to existing retinal vessel segmentation approaches. In conclusion, the proposed method offers high performance and can be easily applied to various biomedical domains and U-Net-based architectures. Therefore, the proposed approach will be beneficial for various biomedical imaging approaches. To facilitate this, we have made the source code of the proposed method publicly available at: https://github.com/resemin/WeightedDeepSupervision.