An Improved Generative Adversarial Network for Footprint Image Segmentation

Abstract

Accurate footprint image segmentation is challenging in forensic applications because fine anatomical structures, weak boundaries, and background interference can degrade segmentation performance. This study presents a task-oriented generative adversarial network (GAN)-based framework for forensic footprint image segmentation. Channel Prior Convolutional Attention (CPCA) modules are integrated into the decoder stages of the generator to recalibrate fused encoder–decoder features and preserve fine details in the toe, arch, and heel regions. In addition, a dual-branch discriminator processes image–mask pairs at the original and downsampled scales, providing complementary constraints on local boundary details and global footprint morphology. The framework is trained with a least-squares adversarial loss and a binary cross-entropy (BCE)–Dice segmentation loss. Experiments on the self-collected aFoot_2025 dataset show that the proposed framework achieves an IoU of 0.9448 and a Dice coefficient of 0.9713, outperforming the evaluated baseline and attention-based alternatives. Under the evaluated synthetic Gaussian-noise settings, the proposed method retained relatively stable segmentation performance. Furthermore, an exploratory footprint-based height-prediction analysis showed modestly lower prediction errors than the baseline GAN. These findings indicate that, under the controlled acquisition conditions of the aFoot_2025 dataset, CPCA-based feature calibration and dual-scale discrimination may improve segmentation-mask quality and provide a possible benefit for subsequent anthropometric analysis.