Morphable Convolutional Neural Network for Biomedical Image Segmentation

We propose a morphable convolution framework, which can be applied to irregularly shaped region of input feature map. This framework reduces the computational footprint of a regular CNN operation in the context of biomedical semantic image segmentation. The traditional CNN based approach has high accuracy, but suffers from high training and inference computation costs, compared to a conventional edge detection based approach. In this work, we combine the concept of morphable convolution with the edge detection algorithms resulting in a hierarchical framework, which first detects the edges and then generate a layer-wise annotation map. The annotation map guides the convolution operation to be run only on a small, useful fraction of pixels in the feature map. We evaluate our framework on three cell tracking datasets and the experimental results indicate that our framework saves similar to 30% and similar to 10% execution time on CPU and GPU, respectively, without loss of accuracy, compared to the baseline conventional CNN approaches.