# Orientation and Context Entangled Network for Retinal Vessel Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.11396 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11396/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 39 of its 76 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Jul 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [Deformable Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06211/) (2017)
- [Attention U-Net: Learning Where to Look for the Pancreas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03999/) (2018)
- [Dual Attention Network for Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02983/) (2018)
- [CCNet: Criss-Cross Attention for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11721/) (2018)
- [Deformable ConvNets v2: More Deformable, Better Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11168/) (2018)
- [Holistically-Nested Edge Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.06375/) (2015)
- [Stand-Alone Self-Attention in Vision Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05909/) (2019)
- [Selective Kernel Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.06586/) (2019)
- [Attention Augmented Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09925/) (2019)
- [Dynamic Convolution: Attention over Convolution Kernels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.03458/) (2019)
- [GCNet: Non-local Networks Meet Squeeze-Excitation Networks and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.11492/) (2019)
- [FFA-Net: Feature Fusion Attention Network for Single Image Dehazing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.07559/) (2019)
- [CondConv: Conditionally Parameterized Convolutions for Efficient Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04971/) (2019)
- [Disentangled Non-Local Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06668/) (2020)
- [DUNet: A deformable network for retinal vessel segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.01206/) (2018)
- [Joint Optic Disc and Cup Segmentation Based on Multi-label Deep Network and Polar Transformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.00926/) (2018)
- [SA-UNet: Spatial Attention U-Net for Retinal Vessel Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.03696/) (2020)
- [Applications of Deep Learning in Fundus Images: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.09864/) (2021)
- [Gabor Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.01450/) (2017)
- [Dynamic Region-Aware Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12243/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Feature Enhancer Segmentation Network (FES-Net) for Vessel Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03535/) (2023)
- [Advancing Medical Image Segmentation with Mini-Net: A Lightweight Solution Tailored for Efficient Segmentation of Medical Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17520/) (2024)
- [LMBiS-Net: A Lightweight Multipath Bidirectional Skip Connection based CNN for Retinal Blood Vessel Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.04968/) (2023)
- [Region Guided Attention Network for Retinal Vessel Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.18970/) (2024)
- [LFRA-Net: A Lightweight Focal and Region-Aware Attention Network for Retinal Vessel Segmentatio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.11811/) (2025)
- [Retinal Vessel Segmentation with Deep Graph and Capsule Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.11508/) (2024)
- [LDMRes-Net: Enabling Efficient Medical Image Segmentation on IoT and Edge Platforms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06145/) (2023)
- [LFA-Net: A Lightweight Network with LiteFusion Attention for Retinal Vessel Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21738/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Most of the existing deep learning based methods for vessel segmentation neglect two important aspects of retinal vessels, one is the orientation information of vessels, and the other is the contextual information of the whole fundus region. In this paper, we propose a robust Orientation and Context Entangled Network (denoted as OCE-Net), which has the capability of extracting complex orientation and context information of the blood vessels. To achieve complex orientation aware, a Dynamic Complex Orientation Aware Convolution (DCOA Conv) is proposed to extract complex vessels with multiple orientations for improving the vessel continuity. To simultaneously capture the global context information and emphasize the important local information, a Global and Local Fusion Module (GLFM) is developed to simultaneously model the long-range dependency of vessels and focus sufficient attention on local thin vessels. A novel Orientation and Context Entangled Non-local (OCE-NL) module is proposed to entangle the orientation and context information together. In addition, an Unbalanced Attention Refining Module (UARM) is proposed to deal with the unbalanced pixel numbers of background, thick and thin vessels. Extensive experiments were performed on several commonly used datasets (DRIVE, STARE and CHASEDB1) and some more challenging datasets (AV-WIDE, UoA-DR, RFMiD and UK Biobank). The ablation study shows that the proposed method achieves promising performance on maintaining the continuity of thin vessels and the comparative experiments demonstrate that our OCE-Net can achieve state-of-the-art performance on retinal vessel segmentation.