SD-Unet: A Structured Dropout U-Net for Retinal Vessel Segmentation

At present, artificial visual diagnosis of fundus diseases has low manual reading efficiency and strong subjectivity, which easily causes false and missed detections. Automatic segmentation of retinal blood vessels in fundus images is very effective for early diagnosis of diseases such as the hypertension and diabetes. In this paper, we utilize the U-shaped structure to exploit the local features of the retinal vessels and perform retinal vessel segmentation in an end-to-end manner. Inspired by the recently DropBlock, we propose a new method called Structured Dropout U-Net (SD-U-net), which abandons the traditional dropout for convolutional layers, and applies the structured dropout to regularize U-Net. Compared to the state-of-the-art methods, we demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed approach.