IRLSG: Invariant Representation Learning for Single-Domain Generalization in Medical Image Segmentation

Single-domain generalization (SDG) can efficiently enhance model generalization while avoiding high annotation costs and privacy concerns. However, existing SDG methods are mainly based on data manipulation and meta-learning, which are not efficient enough due to the limited generalization performance and complex inference. In response to these challenges, we present a novel single domaininvariant representation learning approach for medical image segmentation, called IRLSG, with two appealing designs: (1) A Classscale Photo-metric Augmentation is first proposed to simulate unseen target domain that is sufficient in diversity and informativeness. After that, a Dual-Consistency Framework is further designed to constrain the consistency of intermediate features and segmentation results between the original and the augmented images, which helps to explore the domain-invariant representation. (2) A simple and effective Style Feature Whitening is designed to decouple and remove the domain-specific style from higher-order covariance statistics, which can further improve the modeling and generalization capability of the network. Experimental results on different benchmarks demonstrate that our IRLSG outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods in tackling single-domain generalization.