Employing GRU to combine feature maps in DeeplabV3 for a better segmentation model

In this paper, we aim to enhance the segmentation capabilities of DeeplabV3 by employing Gated Recurrent Neural Network (GRU). A 1-by-1 convolution in DeeplabV3 was replaced by GRU after the Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling (ASSP) layer to combine the input feature maps. The convolution and GRU have sharable parameters, though, the latter has gates that enable/disable the contribution of each input feature map. The experiments on unseen test sets demonstrate that employing GRU instead of convolution would produce better segmentation results. The used datasets are public datasets provided by MedAI competition.