Lightweight Attention Convolutional Neural Network for Retinal Vessel Image Segmentation

Retinal vessel image is an important biological information that can be used for personal identification in the social security domain, and for disease diagnosis in the medical domain. While automatic vessel image segmentation is essential, it is also a challenging task because the retinal vessels have complex topological structures, and the retinal vessels vary in size and shape. In recent years, image segmentation based on the deep learning technique has become a mainstream method. Unfortunately, the existing methods cannot make the best use of the global information, and the model complexity is high. In this article, a convolutional neural network integrated with the attention mechanism is proposed. The overall network structure consists of a basic U-Net and an attention module, and the latter is used to capture global information and to enhance features by placing it in the process of feature fusion. Experiment results on five public datasets show that the proposed scheme outperforms other existing mainstream approaches, and most of the performance indicators are in the leading positions. More importantly, the proposed method has a significant reduction in the number of parameters.