GobletNet: Wavelet-Based High-Frequency Fusion Network for Semantic Segmentation of Electron Microscopy Images

Semantic segmentation of electron microscopy (EM) images is crucial for nanoscale analysis. With the development of deep neural networks (DNNs), semantic segmentation of EM images has achieved remarkable success. However, current EM image segmentation models are usually extensions or adaptations of natural or biomedical models. They lack the full exploration and utilization of the intrinsic characteristics of EM images. Furthermore, they are often designed only for several specific segmentation objects and lack versatility. In this study, we quantitatively analyze the characteristics of EM images compared with those of natural and other biomedical images via the wavelet transform. To better utilize these characteristics, we design a high-frequency (HF) fusion network, GobletNet, which outperforms state-of-the-art models by a large margin in the semantic segmentation of EM images. We use the wavelet transform to generate HF images as extra inputs and use an extra encoding branch to extract HF information. Furthermore, we introduce a fusion-attention module (FAM) into GobletNet to facilitate better absorption and fusion of information from raw images and HF images. Extensive benchmarking on seven public EM datasets (EPFL, CREMI, SNEMI3D, UroCell, MitoEM, Nanowire and BetaSeg) demonstrates the effectiveness of our model. The code is available at https://github.com/Yanfeng-Zhou/GobletNet.