UNET Segmentation

U-Net is an architecture for semantic segmentation. It consists of a contracting path (Up to down) and an expanding path (Down to up). During the contraction, the spatial information is reduced while feature information is increased. The contracting path follows the typical architecture of a convolutional network. It consists of the repeated application of two 3x3 convolutions (unpadded convolutions), each followed by a rectified linear unit (ReLU) and a 2x2 max pooling operation with stride 2 for downsampling. At each downsampling step, we double the number of feature channels. Every step in the expansive path consists of an upsampling of the feature map followed by a 2x2 convolution (“up-convolution”) that halves the number of feature channels, a concatenation with the correspondingly cropped feature map from the contracting path, and two 3x3 convolutions, each followed by a ReLU. The cropping is necessary due to the loss of border pixels in every convolution. At the final layer, a 1x1 convolution is used to map each 64-component feature vector to the desired number of classes. In total the network has 23 convolutional layers.