Deep Frequency Re-Calibration U-Net for Medical Image Segmentation

Reza Azad, Afshin Bozorgpour, Maryam Asadi-Aghbolaghi, Dorit Merhof, Sergio Escalera; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) Workshops, 2021, pp. 3274-3283

The human visual cortex is biased towards shape components while CNNs produce texture biased features. This fact may explain why the performance of CNN significantly degrades with low-labeled input data scenarios. In this paper, we propose a frequency re-calibration U-Net (FRCU-Net) for medical image segmentation. Representing an object in terms of frequency rather than texture can reduce the effect of texture bias and consequently may result in better generalization for a low data regime. To do so, we apply the Laplacian pyramid in the bottleneck layer of the U-shaped structure. The Laplacian pyramid represents the object proposal in different frequency domains, where the high frequencies are responsible for the texture information and lower frequencies might be related to the shape. Adaptively re-calibrating these frequency representations can produce a more discriminative representation for describing the object of interest. To this end, we first propose to use a channel-wise attention mechanism to capture the relationship between the channels of a set of feature maps in one layer of the frequency pyramid. Second, the extracted features of each level of the pyramid are then combined through a non-linear function based on their impact on the final segmentation output. The proposed FRCU-Net is evaluated on five datasets ISIC 2017, ISIC 2018, the PH, lung segmentation, and SegPC 2021 challenge datasets and compared to existing alternatives, achieving state-of-the-art results.