MSGU-Net: a lightweight multi-scale ghost U-Net for image segmentation

U-Net and its variants have been widely used in the field of image segmentation. In this paper, a lightweight multi-scale Ghost U-Net (MSGU-Net) network architecture is proposed. This can efficiently and quickly process image segmentation tasks while generating high-quality object masks for each object. The pyramid structure (SPP-Inception) module and ghost module are seamlessly integrated in a lightweight manner. Equipped with an efficient local attention (ELA) mechanism and an attention gate mechanism, they are designed to accurately identify the region of interest (ROI). The SPP-Inception module and ghost module work in tandem to effectively merge multi-scale information derived from low-level features, high-level features, and decoder masks at each stage. Comparative experiments were conducted between the proposed MSGU-Net and state-of-the-art networks on the ISIC2017 and ISIC2018 datasets. In short, compared to the baseline U-Net, our model achieves superior segmentation performance while reducing parameter and computation costs by 96.08 and 92.59%, respectively. Moreover, MSGU-Net can serve as a lightweight deep neural network suitable for deployment across a range of intelligent devices and mobile platforms, offering considerable potential for widespread adoption.