Box representation has been extensively used for object detection in computer vision. Such representation is efficacious but not necessarily optimized for biomedical objects (e.g., glomeruli), which play an essential role in renal pathology. In this paper, we propose a simple circle representation for medical object detection and introduce CircleNet, an anchor-free detection framework. Compared with the conventional bounding box representation, the proposed bounding circle representation innovates in three-fold: (1) it is optimized for ball-shaped biomedical objects; (2) The circle representation reduced the degree of freedom compared with box representation; (3) It is naturally more rotation invariant. When detecting glomeruli and nuclei on pathological images, the proposed circle representation achieved superior detection performance and be more rotation-invariant, compared with the bounding box. The code has been made publicly available: https://github.com/hrlblab/CircleNet
@article{arxiv.2110.12093,
title = {Circle Representation for Medical Object Detection},
author = {Ethan H. Nguyen and Haichun Yang and Ruining Deng and Yuzhe Lu and Zheyu Zhu and Joseph T. Roland and Le Lu and Bennett A. Landman and Agnes B. Fogo and Yuankai Huo},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2110.12093},
year = {2022}
}
Comments
10 pages, 8 figures, to be published in IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging