Realtime optical flow estimation on vein and artery ultrasound sequences based on knowledge-distillation

In this paper, we propose an approach for realtime optical flow estimation in ultrasound sequences of vein and arteries based on knowledge distillation. Knowledge distillation is a technique to train a faster, smaller model by learning from cues of larger models. Mobile devices with limited resources could be key in providing effective point-of-care healthcare and motivate the search of more lightweight solutions in the deep learning based image analysis. For ultrasound video analysis, motion correspondences of image contents (anatomies) have to be computed for temporal context and for real time application, fast solutions are required. We use a PWC-Net’s optical flow estimation output to create soft targets to train a PDD-Net as lightweight optical flow estimator. We analyse the students’ performance on the challenging task of fast segmentation propagation of vein and arteries in ultrasound images. Experiments show that even though we did not fine-tune the teachers on this task, a model trained with soft targets outperformed a model trained directly with labels and without a teacher.