Bio-inspired XYW parallel pathway edge detection network

Edge detection is of critical importance for middle-level and high-level tasks in computer vision. Existing edge detection methods usually use VGG16 as the encoding network and achieve exceptional performance through transfer learning, which has the characteristics of high parameters and high computational cost. Researchers have implemented edge detection by designing decoding networks. Unlike existing methods, this paper is inspired by the effective mechanisms of edge detection in the parallel pathway of biological vision and proposes a new lightweight encoding–decoding structure for edge detection networks, which we refer to as XYW-Net. In the encoding network, we drew inspiration from the receptive field properties of X-type cells, Y-type cells, and W-type cells involved in the parallel pathway, and developed more meticulous convolutional models. Based on the structure of the parallel pathway, the three cell modules are combined into a novel encoding network and excellent feature extraction performance is obtained. Within the decoding network, this paper draws inspiration from the feature integration ability of the inferotemporal cortex (IT) and introduces a novel feature integration module to constitute the decoding network. Experiments show that the proposed network in this paper obtains the Optimal Dataset Scale (ODS) = 0.812 on the BSDS500 dataset with only 0.79 M parameters. Additionally, the model has exhibited outstanding ODS performance on various publicly available edge detection datasets, including NYUD, BIPEDv1, and Multicue. Moreover, future research could concentrate on implementing more efficient antagonistic mechanisms and devising networks grounded in higher-level visual cortical mechanisms. This could further augment the performance and efficiency of edge detection networks. We encourage researchers to delve into these directions within the field. The codes are available at https://github.com/PXinTao/XYW-Net.