Serial attention network for skin lesion segmentation

Due to the influence of color, boundaries, and shapes of melanoma, the segmentation of the lesion area is still a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose a method to connect two attention modules (channel attention and spatial attention) serially and embed them into the skip connection of the encoder–decoder network. Different from previous work on image segmentation through attention mechanism, we have made a different combination of the existing popular spatial attention module and channel attention module. The experimental results show that the sequence combinations with channel attention in front and spatial attention in the rear are more likely to aggregate global and local information as well as information between channels than other combinations. Our method achieved an average Jaccard Index of 0.7692 on the ISIC2017 dataset. At the same time, we also compared with some advanced methods of image segmentation, the experimental results show our proposed method has a competitive performance.