UnSeGArmaNet: Unsupervised Image Segmentation using Graph Neural Networks with Convolutional ARMA Filters

Abstract

The data-hungry approach of supervised classification drives the interest of the researchers toward unsupervised approaches, especially for problems such as medical image segmentation, where labeled data are difficult to get. Motivated by the recent success of Vision transformers (ViT) in various computer vision tasks, we propose an unsupervised segmentation framework with a pre-trained ViT. Moreover, by harnessing the graph structure inherent within the image, the proposed method achieves a notable performance in segmentation, especially in medical images. We further introduce a modularity-based loss function coupled with an Auto-Regressive Moving Average (ARMA) filter to capture the inherent graph topology within the image. Finally, we observe that employing Scaled Exponential Linear Unit (SELU) and SILU (Swish) activation functions within the proposed Graph Neural Network (GNN) architecture enhances the performance of segmentation. The proposed method provides state-of-the-art performance (even comparable to supervised methods) on benchmark image segmentation datasets such as ECSSD, DUTS, and CUB, as well as challenging medical image segmentation datasets such as KVASIR, CVC-ClinicDB, ISIC-2018. The github repository of the code is available on \url{https://github.com/ksgr5566/UnSeGArmaNet}.