Condensed U-Net (CU-Net): An Improved U-Net Architecture for Cell Segmentation Powered by 4x4 Max-Pooling Layers

Recently, the U-Net has been the dominant approach in the cell segmentation task in biomedical images due to its success in a wide range of image recognition tasks. However, recent studies did not focus enough on updating the architecture of the U-Net and designing specialized loss functions for bioimage segmentation. We show that the U-Net architecture can achieve more successful results with efficient architectural improvements. We propose a condensed encoder-decoder scheme that employs the 4x4 max-pooling operation and triple convolutional layers. The proposed network architecture is trained using a novel combined loss function specifically designed for bioimage segmentation. On the benchmark datasets from the Cell Tracking Challenge, the experimental results show that the proposed cell segmentation system outperforms the U-Net.