HRED-Net: High-Resolution Encoder-Decoder Network for Fine-Grained Image Segmentation

Abstract

Accurate segmentation of fine-grained information is an important step in medical image analysis applications. With the development of the encoder-decoder-based networks, various network structures and algorithms have made significant progress in semantic segmentation tasks. This work aims to present a novel high-resolution encoder-decoder network (HRED-Net) for fine-grained image segmentation that is highly accurate for small-scale targets. We design a multiscale context connection module to extract feature information without reducing the resolution, and propose a multiresolution fusion model to fine-tune the final results. In addition, these modules are trained together with a detail-oriented loss function to enhance the model’s perception of fine-grained parts. Through experiments on the DRIVE dataset, we found a balance between these modules, and our comparison results show that in addition to the extraction multiscale features, the fusion of multiresolution prediction information is also beneficial for fine-grained segmentation. Our method yielded significant improvements in the accuracy and sensitivity in retinal vessel and lung segmentation tasks.