SLSNet: Weakly-Supervised Skin Lesion Segmentation Network with Self-attentions

Computer-aided skin lesion segmentation with high precision is crucial to diagnose skin cancers in the early stage. However, the lack of pixel-level labels makes the skin lesion segmentation tasks challenging. To tackle this problem, a new weakly-supervised skin lesion segmentation network with self-attentions named SLSNet is proposed. SLSNet contains two modules and uses image-level labels as supervision information. One module named Intra-image Self-attention Seed Expansion (ISE) digs intra-image self-attentions with an expansion loss and a confidence loss to expand seed areas. The other module named Inter-image Affinity-based Noise Suppression (IAS) suppresses the noise pixels in attention maps via inter-image correlations. Extensive experiments conducted on ISIC-2017 dataset show that SLSNet achieves relatively high performance while reducing human labeling efforts.