MSM-TDE: multi-scale semantics mining and tiny details enhancement network for retinal vessel segmentation

Retinal image segmentation is crucial for the early diagnosis of some diseases like diabetes and hypertension. Current methods face many challenges, such as inadequate multi-scale semantics and insufficient global information. In view of this, we propose a network called multi-scale semantics mining and tiny details enhancement (MSM-TDE). First, a multi-scale feature input module is designed to capture multi-scale semantics information from the source. Then a fresh multi-scale attention guidance module is constructed to mine local multi-scale semantics while a global semantics enhancement module is proposed to extract global multi-scale semantics. Additionally, an auxiliary vessel detail enhancement branch using dynamic snake convolution is built to enhance the tiny vessel details. Extensive experimental results on four public datasets validate the superiority of MSM-TDE, which obtains competitive performance with satisfactory model complexity. Notably, this study provides an innovative idea of multi-scale semantics mining by diverse methods.