OnlyCaps-Net, a Capsule only Based Neural Network for 2D and 3D Semantic Segmentation

Since their introduction by Sabour et al., capsule networks have been extended to 2D semantic segmentation with the introduction of convolutional capsules. While extended further to 3D semantic segmentation when mixed with Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), no capsule-only network (to the best of our knowledge) has been able to reach CNNs’ accuracy on multilabel segmentation tasks. In this work, we propose OnlyCaps-Net, the first competitive capsule-only network for 2D and 3D multi-label semantic segmentation. OnlyCaps-Net improves both capsules’ accuracy and inference speed by replacing Sabour et al. squashing with the introduction of two novel squashing functions, i.e. softsquash or unitsquash, and the iterative routing with a new parameter free single pass routing, i.e. unit routing. Additionally, OnlyCaps-Net introduces a new parameter efficient convolutional capsule type, i.e. depthwise separable convolutional capsule.