Self-Paced Dual-Axis Attention Fusion Network for Retinal Vessel Segmentation

The segmentation of retinal vessels plays an essential role in the early recognition of ophthalmic diseases in clinics. Increasingly, approaches based on deep learning have been pushing vessel segmentation performance, yet it is still a challenging problem due to the complex structure of retinal vessels and the lack of precisely labeled samples. In this paper, we propose a self-paced dual-axis attention fusion network (SPDAA-Net). Firstly, a self-paced learning mechanism using a query-by-committee algorithm is designed to guide the model to learn from easy to hard, which makes model training more intelligent. Secondly, during fusing of multi-scale features, a dual-axis attention mechanism composed of height and width attention is developed to perceive the object, which brings in long-range dependencies while reducing computation complexity. Furthermore, CutMix data augmentation is applied to increase the generalization of the model, enhance the recognition ability of global and local features, and ultimately boost accuracy. We implement comprehensive experiments validating that our SPDAA-Net obtains remarkable performance on both the public DRIVE and CHASE-DB1 datasets.