A Streamlined Attention Mechanism for Image Classification and Fine-Grained Visual Recognition

In the recent advancements attention mechanism in deep learning had played a vital role in proving better results in tasks under computer vision. There exists multiple kinds of works under attention mechanism which includes under image classification, fine-grained visual recognition, image captioning, video captioning, object detection and recognition tasks. Global and local attention are the two attention based mechanisms which helps in interpreting the attentive partial. Considering this criteria, there exists channel and spatial attention where in channel attention considers the most attentive channel among the produced block of channels and spatial attention considers which region among the space needs to be focused on. We have proposed a streamlined attention block module which helps in enhancing the feature based learning with less number of additional layers i.e., a GAP layer followed by a linear layer with an incorporation of second order pooling (GSoP) after every layer in the utilized encoder. This mechanism has produced better range dependencies by the conducted experimentation. We have experimented our model on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and FGVC-Aircrafts datasets considering finegrained visual recognition. We were successful in achieving state-of-the-result for FGVC-Aircrafts with an accuracy of 97%. © 2021, Brno University of Technology. All rights reserved.