Deeply Supervised Rotation Equivariant Network for Lesion Segmentation in Dermoscopy Images

Automatic lesion segmentation in dermoscopy images is an essential step for computer-aided diagnosis of melanoma. The dermoscopy images exhibits rotational and reflectional symmetry, however, this geometric property has not been encoded in the state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks based skin lesion segmentation methods. In this paper, we present a deeply supervised rotation equivariant network for skin lesion segmentation by extending the recent group rotation equivariant network. Specifically, we propose the G-upsampling and G-projection operations to adapt the rotation equivariant classification network for our skin lesion segmentation problem. To further increase the performance, we integrate the deep supervision scheme into our proposed rotation equivariant segmentation architecture. The whole framework is equivariant to input transformations, including rotation and reflection, which improves the network efficiency and thus contributes to the segmentation performance. We extensively evaluate our method on the ISIC 2017 skin lesion challenge dataset. The experimental results show that our rotation equivariant networks consistently excel the regular counterparts with the same model complexity under different experimental settings. Our best model also outperforms the state-of-the-art challenging methods, which further demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed deeply supervised rotation equivariant segmentation network.