In the field of connectomics, neuroscientists seek to identify cortical connectivity comprehensively. Neuronal boundary detection from the Electron Microscopy (EM) images is often done to assist the automatic reconstruction of neuronal circuit. But the segmentation of EM images is a challenging problem, as it requires the detector to be able to detect both filament-like thin and blob-like thick membrane, while suppressing the ambiguous intracellular structure. In this paper, we propose multi-stage multi-recursive-input fully convolutional networks to address this problem. The multiple recursive inputs for one stage, i.e., the multiple side outputs with different receptive field sizes learned from the lower stage, provide multi-scale contextual boundary information for the consecutive learning. This design is biologically-plausible, as it likes a human visual system to compare different possible segmentation solutions to address the ambiguous boundary issue. Our multi-stage networks are trained end-to-end. It achieves promising results on a public available mouse piriform cortex dataset, which significantly outperforms other competitors.

本文提出了多阶段多递归输入的完全卷积网络通过学习低阶段的不同感受野大小的多个侧面输出，为后续学习提供多尺度的上下文边界信息，以解决电子显微镜图像分割的挑战问题，结果在两个公共可用的 EM 分割数据集上取得了有希望的结果。

多阶段多递归输入全卷积网络用于神经元边界检测