ACMU-nets: Attention cascading modular U-nets incorporating squeeze and excitation blocks

Abstract

In document analysis research, image-to-image conversion models such as a U-Net have been shown significant performance. Recently, cascaded U-Nets research is suggested for solving complex document analysis studies. However, improving performance by adding U-Net modules requires using too many parameters in cascaded U-Nets. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a method for enhancing the performance of cascaded U-Nets. We suggest a novel document image binarization method by utilizing Cascading Modular U-Nets (CMU-Nets) and Squeeze and Excitation blocks (SE-blocks). Through verification experiments, we point out the problems caused by the use of SE-blocks in existing CMU-Nets and suggest how to use SE-blocks in CMU-Nets. We use the Document Image Binarization (DIBCO) 2017 dataset to evaluate the proposed model.