UNet: U-shaped Network Explained - What is it and Why is it Important?

UNet is the abbreviation for 'U-shaped Network'. This name comes from the overall structure of the network which resembles a U-shape. It consists of a downsampling (encoder) and an upsampling (decoder) part, connected by skip connections. The network was initially designed for semantic segmentation tasks and has achieved significant success in medical image segmentation. As a result, this structure became known as UNet.