  Top-down instance segmentation framework has shown its superiority in object
detection compared to the bottom-up framework. While it is efficient in
addressing over-segmentation, top-down instance segmentation suffers from
over-crop problem. However, a complete segmentation mask is crucial for
biological image analysis as it delivers important morphological properties
such as shapes and volumes. In this paper, we propose a region proposal
rectification (RPR) module to address this challenging incomplete segmentation
problem. In particular, we offer a progressive ROIAlign module to introduce
neighbor information into a series of ROIs gradually. The ROI features are fed
into an attentive feed-forward network (FFN) for proposal box regression. With
additional neighbor information, the proposed RPR module shows significant
improvement in correction of region proposal locations and thereby exhibits
favorable instance segmentation performances on three biological image datasets
compared to state-of-the-art baseline methods. Experimental results demonstrate
that the proposed RPR module is effective in both anchor-based and anchor-free
top-down instance segmentation approaches, suggesting the proposed method can
be applied to general top-down instance segmentation of biological images.
