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U-Net

updated 2026-08-20

U-Net is a kind of neural network originally purposed for medical image segmentation (~2015) given the name based on the u-shape form when drawn:

  1. In downsampling we operate on a feature extraction principle, applying 3x3 Convolutions followed by ReLu activation. Then iteratively apply a maxpool layer to reduce feature size while retaining features.
  2. On the bottleneck layer, where most of the important features have been extracted it is processed even further
  3. Then upsampling layer increases information using
    • skip connections to regain spatial details that may have been lost when downsampling. we match a similar size region from downsampling, and copy a centered subset that matches width x height. Then we concatenate this to the channel dimension.
    • deconvolution for increasing spatial size
u-net.png