Semi-Supervised Curriculum Learning for Ultra-Wide-Angle fundus Optic Disc Segmentation

Segmentation of the optic disc in ultra-wide-angle fundus images could aid in detection and diagnosis of diabetic kidney disease and diabetic retinopathy. Due to the wide field of view, large image size, and small targets of ultra-wide-angle fundus images, it’s hard to annotate them. In this case, semi-supervised methods could solve this problem. However, standalone semi-supervised training does not take into account the differences between samples. We developed a new semi-supervised training method incorporating curriculum learning, where the model initially trains on easier samples and gradually progresses to more hard ones. This strategy could avoid the possible negative impact of the unlabeled samples in early stages in training and strengthen model’s robustness and serves as a plug- and-play approach and is adaptable to existing semi-supervised semantic segmentation methods. More concretely, we design a difficulty measurer to estimate the training difficulty of samples from the perspective of the entire dataset and a pace controller to control training time and duration of different samples according to their training difficulty. The experiment result shows the method we proposed could improves the performance.