U-Net
A convolutional neural network architecture uniquely shaped like a 'U', designed for extremely precise, pixel-level image segmentation tasks.
Think of It Like This
Like a factory line that shrinks a car down to inspect its engine, then perfectly reassembles the body panels back to full size.
Originally developed for biomedical image segmentation, the U-Net consists of a contracting downsampling path to capture deep semantic context, and an expanding upsampling path to enable precise localization. It relies heavily on skip connections linking the two sides. It is famously used as the primary denoising engine in Stable Diffusion.