Fine-grained image classification method based on hybrid attention module

Abstract

To efficiently capture feature information in tasks of fine-grained image classification, this study introduces a new network model for fine-grained image classification, which utilizes a hybrid attention approach. The model is built upon a hybrid attention module (MA), and with the assistance of the attention erasure module (EA), it can adaptively enhance the prominent areas in the image and capture more detailed image information. Specifically, for tasks involving fine-grained image classification, this study designs an attention module capable of applying the attention mechanism to both the channel and spatial dimensions. This highlights the important regions and key feature channels in the image, allowing for the extraction of distinct local features. Furthermore, this study presents an attention erasure module (EA) that can remove significant areas in the image based on the features identified; thus, shifting focus to additional feature details within the image and improving the diversity and completeness of the features. Moreover, this study enhances the pooling layer of ResNet50 to augment the perceptual region and the capability to extract features from the network’s less deep layers. For the objective of fine-grained image classification, this study extracts a variety of features and merges them effectively to create the final feature representation. To assess the effectiveness of the proposed model, experiments were conducted on three publicly available fine-grained image classification datasets: Stanford Cars, FGVC-Aircraft, and CUB-200–2011. The method achieved classification accuracies of 92.8, 94.0, and 88.2% on these datasets, respectively. In comparison with existing approaches, the efficiency of this method has significantly improved, demonstrating higher accuracy and robustness.