SWITi: Quantifying and Reducing Tiling Artifacts with Sliding Window Inner Tiling
This work addresses the issue of stitching artifacts—often mistaken for genuine structures—in large-image tile-based prediction, which arises from limited receptive fields and independent posterior sampling. The proposed method, SWITi, mitigates these artifacts during inference by averaging predictions over overlapping regions via a sliding window, thereby distributing discrepancies between adjacent tiles across varying locations and preventing artifact accumulation at fixed boundaries, all without requiring additional forward passes. The study introduces, for the first time, no-reference artifact evaluation metrics—FRT and ASV—and integrates pixel-gradient permutation testing to enable automatic detection and quantification of artifacts. Evaluated on both 2D and 3D fluorescence microscopy images, SWITi substantially suppresses stitching seams, enhances reconstruction fidelity and resolution, and effectively supports downstream biomedical analysis.