# CFPNet-M: A Light-Weight Encoder-Decoder Based Network for Multimodal Biomedical Image Real-Time Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.04075 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04075/

## Key facts

- Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 May 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [Aggregated Residual Transformations for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05431/) (2016)
- [Pyramid Scene Parsing Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01105/) (2016)
- [Xception: Deep Learning with Depthwise Separable Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02357/) (2016)
- [Rethinking Atrous Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05587/) (2017)
- [SegNet: A Deep Convolutional Encoder-Decoder Architecture for Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.00561/) (2015)
- [Image Segmentation Using Deep Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.05566/) (2020)
- [Skin Lesion Analysis Toward Melanoma Detection: A Challenge at the 2017 International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI), Hosted by the International Skin Imaging Collaboration (ISIC)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.05006/) (2017)
- [Road Extraction by Deep Residual U-Net](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10684/) (2017)
- [ENet: A Deep Neural Network Architecture for Real-Time Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.02147/) (2016)
- [ICNet for Real-Time Semantic Segmentation on High-Resolution Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.08545/) (2017)
- [MultiResUNet : Rethinking the U-Net Architecture for Multimodal Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.04049/) (2019)
- [Understanding Convolution for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08502/) (2017)
- [ESPNet: Efficient Spatial Pyramid of Dilated Convolutions for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.06815/) (2018)
- [ESPNetv2: A Light-weight, Power Efficient, and General Purpose Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11431/) (2018)
- [LEDNet: A Lightweight Encoder-Decoder Network for Real-Time Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02423/) (2019)
- [DABNet: Depth-wise Asymmetric Bottleneck for Real-time Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11357/) (2019)
- [A note on the triangle inequality for the Jaccard distance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.02696/) (2016)
- [DC-UNet: Rethinking the U-Net Architecture with Dual Channel Efficient CNN for Medical Images Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.00414/) (2020)
- [CFPNet: Channel-wise Feature Pyramid for Real-Time Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12212/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [CaraNet: Context Axial Reverse Attention Network for Segmentation of Small Medical Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13366/) (2023)
- [High Fidelity 3D Hand Shape Reconstruction via Scalable Graph Frequency Decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.05541/) (2023)
- [Zero-Shot Surgical Tool Segmentation in Monocular Video Using Segment Anything Model 2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.01648/) (2024)
- [NeuroBOLT: Resting-state EEG-to-fMRI Synthesis with Multi-dimensional Feature Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05341/) (2024)
- [Self-Supervised Surgical Instrument 3D Reconstruction from a Single Camera Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14467/) (2022)
- [Surgical Depth Anything: Depth Estimation for Surgical Scenes using Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07434/) (2024)
- [Real-Time Semantic Segmentation: A Brief Survey & Comparative Study in Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06047/) (2023)
- [CaraNet: Context Axial Reverse Attention Network for Segmentation of Small Medical Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07368/) (2021)
- [DoubleU-NetPlus: A Novel Attention and Context Guided Dual U-Net with Multi-Scale Residual Feature Fusion Network for Semantic Segmentation of Medical Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14235/) (2022)
- [EAP4EMSIG -- Enhancing Event-Driven Microscopy for Microfluidic Single-Cell Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.00047/) (2025)
- [MyGO: Make your Goals Obvious, Avoiding Semantic Confusion in Prostate Cancer Lesion Region Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.17269/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Currently, developments of deep learning techniques are providing instrumental to identify, classify, and quantify patterns in medical images. Segmentation is one of the important applications in medical image analysis. In this regard, U-Net is the predominant approach to medical image segmentation tasks. However, we found that those U-Net based models have limitations in several aspects, for example, millions of parameters in the U-Net consuming considerable computation resource and memory, lack of global information, and missing some tough objects. Therefore, we applied two modifications to improve the U-Net model: 1) designed and added the dilated channel-wise CNN module, 2) simplified the U shape network. Based on these two modifications, we proposed a novel light-weight architecture -- Channel-wise Feature Pyramid Network for Medicine (CFPNet-M). To evaluate our method, we selected five datasets with different modalities: thermography, electron microscopy, endoscopy, dermoscopy, and digital retinal images. And we compared its performance with several models having different parameter scales. This paper also involves our previous studies of DC-UNet and some commonly used light-weight neural networks. We applied the Tanimoto similarity instead of the Jaccard index for gray-level image measurements. By comparison, CFPNet-M achieves comparable segmentation results on all five medical datasets with only 0.65 million parameters, which is about 2% of U-Net, and 8.8 MB memory. Meanwhile, the inference speed can reach 80 FPS on a single RTX 2070Ti GPU with the 256 by 192 pixels input size.