Open Access

Max Gutbrod, David Rauber, Christoph Palm

• We address domain generalization (DG) in mitotic-cell (MC) detection by combining a β-variational autoencoder (VAE) for domain transformations with feature-space alignment together with an object detector. The β-VAE synthesizes domain-transformed images, and the detector is trained to map originals and their transformed counterparts to equal representations. On the MIDOG++ dataset, this approachWe address domain generalization (DG) in mitotic-cell (MC) detection by combining a β-variational autoencoder (VAE) for domain transformations with feature-space alignment together with an object detector. The β-VAE synthesizes domain-transformed images, and the detector is trained to map originals and their transformed counterparts to equal representations. On the MIDOG++ dataset, this approach improves out-of-domain detection F1 scores by 7 and 3 percentage points compared to the color-variation augmentation and stain-normalization baselines. Results further suggest that morphology shifts hinder generalization more than stain shifts.…