FreqU-FNet: Frequency-Aware U-Net for Imbalanced Medical Image Segmentation

Fuente: arXiv
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Autore principale: Xing, Ruiqi
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Xing, Ruiqi
author_facet Xing, Ruiqi
contents Medical image segmentation faces persistent challenges due to severe class imbalance and the frequency-specific distribution of anatomical structures. Most conventional CNN-based methods operate in the spatial domain and struggle to capture minority class signals, often affected by frequency aliasing and limited spectral selectivity. Transformer-based models, while powerful in modeling global dependencies, tend to overlook critical local details necessary for fine-grained segmentation. To overcome these limitations, we propose FreqU-FNet, a novel U-shaped segmentation architecture operating in the frequency domain. Our framework incorporates a Frequency Encoder that leverages Low-Pass Frequency Convolution and Daubechies wavelet-based downsampling to extract multi-scale spectral features. To reconstruct fine spatial details, we introduce a Spatial Learnable Decoder (SLD) equipped with an adaptive multi-branch upsampling strategy. Furthermore, we design a frequency-aware loss (FAL) function to enhance minority class learning. Extensive experiments on multiple medical segmentation benchmarks demonstrate that FreqU-FNet consistently outperforms both CNN and Transformer baselines, particularly in handling under-represented classes, by effectively exploiting discriminative frequency bands.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_17544
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle FreqU-FNet: Frequency-Aware U-Net for Imbalanced Medical Image Segmentation
Xing, Ruiqi
Image and Video Processing
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Medical image segmentation faces persistent challenges due to severe class imbalance and the frequency-specific distribution of anatomical structures. Most conventional CNN-based methods operate in the spatial domain and struggle to capture minority class signals, often affected by frequency aliasing and limited spectral selectivity. Transformer-based models, while powerful in modeling global dependencies, tend to overlook critical local details necessary for fine-grained segmentation. To overcome these limitations, we propose FreqU-FNet, a novel U-shaped segmentation architecture operating in the frequency domain. Our framework incorporates a Frequency Encoder that leverages Low-Pass Frequency Convolution and Daubechies wavelet-based downsampling to extract multi-scale spectral features. To reconstruct fine spatial details, we introduce a Spatial Learnable Decoder (SLD) equipped with an adaptive multi-branch upsampling strategy. Furthermore, we design a frequency-aware loss (FAL) function to enhance minority class learning. Extensive experiments on multiple medical segmentation benchmarks demonstrate that FreqU-FNet consistently outperforms both CNN and Transformer baselines, particularly in handling under-represented classes, by effectively exploiting discriminative frequency bands.
title FreqU-FNet: Frequency-Aware U-Net for Imbalanced Medical Image Segmentation
topic Image and Video Processing
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.17544