用经典色彩匹配提升医学图像模型泛化能力,不伤结构、零计算开销。
Simple, Safe, and Overlooked: Reclaiming Sustainable Domain Generalization with Statistical Color Matching

- 直接在RGB空间做均值方差匹配,训练免调参,解释性强。
- 跨数据集提升平衡准确率最高达+9%,比先进方法更优。
- 适合追求可解释性与低碳的医疗AI研发团队使用。
硬件变化、颜色差异及患者特征随部署时间演变,常导致训练好的医学图像分类器失效。现有解决方案效果有限:标准色彩抖动多样性不足,而深度生成风格迁移算法会幻化特征、破坏临床相关结构,并消耗大量算力。为此,本文重新审视经典统计色彩匹配,将其改造为Colorist——一种高效的数据增强策略,在RGB空间直接实施全局均值-标准差匹配。该方法无需训练、完全可解释,能安全生成结构完整的域间变异,在结构保真度和色彩对齐上优于深度生成模型。在跨分布的组织病理学、外周血、皮肤病和视网膜数据集上,其平衡准确率相比当前最优领域泛化正则化方法最高提升+9%,相比未增强基线提升+13%。由于避免在增强环节使用神经网络,Colorist保留解剖结构完整性,显著降低碳足迹,且可无缝集成至标准数据加载器。这些结果确立了统计匹配作为临床鲁棒性的一种安全、可解释却被忽视的替代方案。源码已开源:https://github.com/sdoerrich97/colorist。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Hardware shifts, color variations, and changing patient characteristics between development and deployment routinely break trained medical image classifiers. Existing remedies fall short: standard color jittering provides insufficient diversity, while deep generative style transfer algorithms hallucinate features, destroy clinically relevant structures, and waste massive compute resources. To address this, we revisit classical statistical color matching and repurpose it as Colorist, a highly efficient data augmentation strategy that applies global mean-standard deviation matching directly in the RGB color space. We demonstrate that this training-free, fully interpretable approach safely generates structurally intact domain variations, outperforming deep generative models in structural fidelity and color alignment. Across out-of-distribution histopathology, peripheral blood, dermatology, and retinal datasets, it improves balanced accuracy by up to +9% over state-of-the-art domain generalization regularizers and by +13% over an unaugmented baseline. Moreover, by avoiding neural networks in the augmentation loop, Colorist preserves anatomical structure, minimizes carbon footprint, and integrates seamlessly into standard dataloaders. Together, these findings establish statistical matching as a safe, interpretable, yet overlooked alternative to deep architectures for clinical robustness. Source code is available at https://github.com/sdoerrich97/colorist.
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