ComBiNet: Compact Convolutional Bayesian Neural Network for Image Segmentation

Abstract

Fully convolutional U-shaped neural networks have largely been the dominant approach for pixel-wise image segmentation. In this work, we tackle two defects that hinder their deployment in real-world applications: 1) Predictions lack uncertainty quantification that may be crucial to many decision-making systems; 2) Large memory storage and computational consumption demanding extensive hardware resources. To address these issues and improve their practicality we demonstrate a few-parameter compact Bayesian convolutional architecture, that achieves a marginal improvement in accuracy in comparison to related work using significantly fewer parameters and compute operations. The architecture combines parameter-efficient operations such as separable convolutions, bilinear interpolation, multi-scale feature propagation and Bayesian inference for per-pixel uncertainty quantification through Monte Carlo Dropout. The best performing configurations required fewer than 2.5 million parameters on diverse challenging datasets with few observations.

Publication
Artificial Neural Networks and Machine Learning – ICANN 2021