# A Refined Equilibrium Generative Adversarial Network for Retinal Vessel Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.11936 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11936/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 26 Sep 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Human Treelike Tubular Structure Segmentation: A Comprehensive Review and Future Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11203/) (2022)
- [SPNet: A novel deep neural network for retinal vessel segmentation based on shared decoder and pyramid-like loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.09515/) (2022)
- [FS-Net: Full Scale Network and Adaptive Threshold for Improving Extraction of Micro-Retinal Vessel Structures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08059/) (2023)
- [MDF-MLLM: Deep Fusion Through Cross-Modal Feature Alignment for Contextually Aware Fundoscopic Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21358/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Objective: Recognizing retinal vessel abnormity is vital to early diagnosis of ophthalmological diseases and cardiovascular events. However, segmentation results are highly influenced by elusive vessels, especially in low-contrast background and lesion region. In this work, we present an end-to-end synthetic neural network, containing a symmetric equilibrium generative adversarial network (SEGAN), multi-scale features refine blocks (MSFRB), and attention mechanism (AM) to enhance the performance on vessel segmentation. Method: The proposed network is granted powerful multi-scale representation capability to extract detail information. First, SEGAN constructs a symmetric adversarial architecture, which forces generator to produce more realistic images with local details. Second, MSFRB are devised to prevent high-resolution features from being obscured, thereby merging multi-scale features better. Finally, the AM is employed to encourage the network to concentrate on discriminative features. Results: On public dataset DRIVE, STARE, CHASEDB1, and HRF, we evaluate our network quantitatively and compare it with state-of-the-art works. The ablation experiment shows that SEGAN, MSFRB, and AM both contribute to the desirable performance. Conclusion: The proposed network outperforms the mature methods and effectively functions in elusive vessels segmentation, achieving highest scores in Sensitivity, G-Mean, Precision, and F1-Score while maintaining the top level in other metrics. Significance: The appreciable performance and computational efficiency offer great potential in clinical retinal vessel segmentation application. Meanwhile, the network could be utilized to extract detail information in other biomedical issues