  Feedforward multilayer networks trained by supervised learning have recently
demonstrated state of the art performance on image labeling problems such as
boundary prediction and scene parsing. As even very low error rates can limit
practical usage of such systems, methods that perform closer to human accuracy
remain desirable. In this work, we propose a new type of network with the
following properties that address what we hypothesize to be limiting aspects of
existing methods: (1) a `wide' structure with thousands of features, (2) a
large field of view, (3) recursive iterations that exploit statistical
dependencies in label space, and (4) a parallelizable architecture that can be
trained in a fraction of the time compared to benchmark multilayer
convolutional networks. For the specific image labeling problem of boundary
prediction, we also introduce a novel example weighting algorithm that improves
segmentation accuracy. Experiments in the challenging domain of connectomic
reconstruction of neural circuity from 3d electron microscopy data show that
these "Deep And Wide Multiscale Recursive" (DAWMR) networks lead to new levels
of image labeling performance. The highest performing architecture has twelve
layers, interwoven supervised and unsupervised stages, and uses an input field
of view of 157,464 voxels ($54^3$) to make a prediction at each image location.
We present an associated open source software package that enables the simple
and flexible creation of DAWMR networks.
