Fine-grained classification based on multi-scale pyramid convolution networks

PLoS One. 2021 Jul 9;16(7):e0254054. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0254054. eCollection 2021.

Abstract

The large intra-class variance and small inter-class variance are the key factor affecting fine-grained image classification. Recently, some algorithms have been more accurate and efficient. However, these methods ignore the multi-scale information of the network, resulting in insufficient ability to capture subtle changes. To solve this problem, a weakly supervised fine-grained classification network based on multi-scale pyramid is proposed in this paper. It uses pyramid convolution kernel to replace ordinary convolution kernel in residual network, which can expand the receptive field of the convolution kernel and use complementary information of different scales. Meanwhile, the weakly supervised data augmentation network (WS-DAN) is used to prevent over fitting and improve the performance of the model. In addition, a new attention module, which includes spatial attention and channel attention, is introduced to pay more attention to the object part in the image. The comprehensive experiments are carried out on three public benchmarks. It shows that the proposed method can extract subtle feature and achieve classification effectively.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms*
  • Databases as Topic
  • Neural Networks, Computer*

Grants and funding

This work was supported by The National Key R&D Program of China under Grant 2017YFB1302400. The author, Gaihua Wang, has received financial support from this fund, which has provided financial help for our design. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. There is no conflict of interest with the funders. The author would like to thank the national key R & D program of China under Grant 2017yfb1302400 for its financial support.