U-net: Convolutional networks for biomedical image segmentation

O Ronneberger, P Fischer, T Brox - … , Munich, Germany, October 5-9, 2015 …, 2015 - Springer
Medical image computing and computer-assisted intervention–MICCAI 2015: 18th …, 2015Springer
There is large consent that successful training of deep networks requires many thousand
annotated training samples. In this paper, we present a network and training strategy that
relies on the strong use of data augmentation to use the available annotated samples more
efficiently. The architecture consists of a contracting path to capture context and a symmetric
expanding path that enables precise localization. We show that such a network can be
trained end-to-end from very few images and outperforms the prior best method (a sliding …
Abstract
There is large consent that successful training of deep networks requires many thousand annotated training samples. In this paper, we present a network and training strategy that relies on the strong use of data augmentation to use the available annotated samples more efficiently. The architecture consists of a contracting path to capture context and a symmetric expanding path that enables precise localization. We show that such a network can be trained end-to-end from very few images and outperforms the prior best method (a sliding-window convolutional network) on the ISBI challenge for segmentation of neuronal structures in electron microscopic stacks. Using the same network trained on transmitted light microscopy images (phase contrast and DIC) we won the ISBI cell tracking challenge 2015 in these categories by a large margin. Moreover, the network is fast. Segmentation of a 512x512 image takes less than a second on a recent GPU. The full implementation (based on Caffe) and the trained networks are available at http://lmb.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/people/ronneber/u-net .
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