MSCA-UNet: Multi-Scale Context and Attention U-Net for Image Segmentation

Abstract

U-Net remains a practical baseline for image segmentation because of its simple encoder-decoder structure and skip connections. However, the bottleneck representation is still dominated by a limited set of receptive fields, while decoder features are propagated without explicitly emphasizing the most informative channels and spatial locations. This paper presents MSCA-UNet, a U-Net-based segmentation architecture that combines multi-scale contextual aggregation at the bottleneck with channel-spatial attention refinement in the decoder. The multi-scale module uses parallel atrous convolutions to capture contextual features at different receptive fields, while Convolutional Block Attention Modules (CBAMs) progressively recalibrate decoder features. Under identical experimental settings, the baseline U-Net achieves 96.9% mIoU on a held-out test set. Adding multi-scale context improves mIoU to 97.5%, while attention alone reaches 98.4%. Combining both mechanisms yields 99.1% mIoU, a 2.2 percentage-point improvement over the baseline. Parameter analysis further shows that the attention-only variant adds approximately 0.044M parameters, whereas the multi-scale module contributes most of the additional model capacity. The results support the view that multi-scale context enrichment and attention-based feature refinement provide complementary benefits within a U-Net framework.