  Image segmentation is a fundamental and challenging problem in computer
vision with applications spanning multiple areas, such as medical imaging,
remote sensing, and autonomous vehicles. Recently, convolutional neural
networks (CNNs) have gained traction in the design of automated segmentation
pipelines. Although CNN-based models are adept at learning abstract features
from raw image data, their performance is dependent on the availability and
size of suitable training datasets. Additionally, these models are often unable
to capture the details of object boundaries and generalize poorly to unseen
classes. In this thesis, we devise novel methodologies that address these
issues and establish robust representation learning frameworks for
fully-automatic semantic segmentation in medical imaging and mainstream
computer vision. In particular, our contributions include (1) state-of-the-art
2D and 3D image segmentation networks for computer vision and medical image
analysis, (2) an end-to-end trainable image segmentation framework that unifies
CNNs and active contour models with learnable parameters for fast and robust
object delineation, (3) a novel approach for disentangling edge and texture
processing in segmentation networks, and (4) a novel few-shot learning model in
both supervised settings and semi-supervised settings where synergies between
latent and image spaces are leveraged to learn to segment images given limited
training data.
