Multi-Attention Gate Based U-net For Retinal Vessel Segmentation

Abstract

Retinal blood vessel segmentation images can be used to detect and evaluate various cardiovascular and ophthalmic diseases. However, due to the intricate vessel structures and blurred boundaries of vessels, it is a huge challenge to efficiently and accurately segment blood vessels. To deal with the above problems, this paper improves on the U-net by firstly using multi-scale feature convolution with kernels of varying size for feature extraction. Second, a non-local attention mechanism is applied to obtain richer global semantic information. Then multi-attention gate is used in the skip connection part by inputting feature maps of various scales and dimensions and selectively learning the interrelated regions, which improves the segmentation ability of the network model for the tiny structure of blood vessels. Quantitative and qualitative experimental results on two public datasets, DRIVE and CHASE_DB1, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.