Dear Colleagues

Nowadays, deep learning algorithms are the most successful methods in image processing, thanks to an ever-increasing number of networks and architectures that have proven more efficient than anything designed before. Yet, one major weakness known to deep learning methods is their need for huge amounts of data to be trained and show good performance. Another key element to their success lies in the manual annotation of the training data. Indeed, most deep learning methods used in image processing are supervised. It implies that for applications where no or not enough annotated images are available, there is a real need for the development of unsupervised deep learning methods able to analyse them! This is the case for various applications such as medical image analysis, remote sensing analysis, and many segmentation tasks, where the diversity of images and tasks to be performed often makes it impossible to have enough annotated images to train a supervised deep learning architecture that will lead to good performances. Furthermore, even when only very few annotated images are available, the question of the labelling reliability is also an issue for tasks that require high accuracy.

Given these very concrete problems, unsupervised deep learning methods—or self-supervised methods as they are sometimes called—open the possibility of quickly processing images that would have been otherwise impossible to analyse with regular deep learning methods. Yet, there are many challenges to the development of such methods that so far mostly rely on reconstruction loss functions from autoencoder models, and also suffer from issues similar to the ones faced by traditional unsupervised methods such as linking the elements of interest found by an unsupervised method with actual classes that are relevant to a real-world application.

For all these reasons, we invite you to submit your work related to unsupervised or weakly supervised applications of deep learning for image analysis, regardless of the field of application.

Prof. Dr. Jérémie Sublime
Prof. Dr. Hélène Urien
Guest Editors

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• clustering
• autoencoder
• unsupervised learning
• self-supervised learning
• automated segmentation
• semi-supervised learning
• weakly supervised learning