Denoising diffusion probabilistic models for generation of realistic fully-annotated microscopy image datasets

by Dennis Eschweiler, Rüveyda Yilmaz, Matisse Baumann, Ina Laube, Rijo Roy, Abin Jose, Daniel Brückner, Johannes Stegmaier

Recent advances in computer vision have led to significant progress in the generation of realistic image data, with denoising diffusion probabilistic models proving to be a particularly effective method. In this study, we demonstrate that diffusion models can effectively generate fully-annotated microscopy image data sets through an unsupervised and intuitive approach, using rough sketches of desired structures as the starting point. The proposed pipeline helps to reduce the reliance on manual annotations when training deep learning-based segmentation approaches and enables the segmentation of diverse datasets without the need for human annotations. We demonstrate that segmentation models trained with a small set of synthetic image data reach accuracy levels comparable to those of generalist models trained with a large and diverse collection of manually annotated image data, thereby offering a streamlined and specialized application of segmentation models.