E-Res U-Net: An improved U-Net model for segmentation of muscle images

In this paper, we propose a new semantic segmentation network called 'E-Res U-Net', to achieve better segmentation results of deep and superficial muscles in ultrasonic muscle images. This model is based on U-Net, and its structure has been modified to improve the performance of the algorithm. There are three aspects of improvement based on U-Net, including E-Res layer, dilated convolution module, and E-Res path. Additional experiments demonstrate that each designed module in our proposed network is effective, can improve the accuracy compared to the original U-Net. When compared with other algorithms which are state-of-the-art, the experimental result under the overall network structure is even more excellent.