FedST: Federated Style Transfer Learning for Non-IID Image Segmentation

Abstract Federated learning collaboratively trains machine learning models among different clients while keeping data privacy and has become the mainstream for breaking data silos. However, the non-independently and identically distribution (i.e., Non-IID) characteristic of different image domains among different clients reduces the benefits of federated learning and has become a bottleneck problem restricting the accuracy and generalization of federated models. In this work, we propose a novel federated image segmentation method based on style transfer, FedST, by using a denoising diffusion probabilistic model to achieve feature disentanglement and image synthesis of cross-domain image data between multiple clients. Thus it can share style features among clients while protecting structure features of image data, which effectively alleviates the influence of the Non-IID phenomenon. Experiments prove that our method achieves superior segmentation performance compared to state-of-art methods among four different Non-IID datasets in objective and subjective assessment. The code is available at https://github.com/YoferChen/FedST.