Fine-Grained Recognition via Attribute-Guided Attentive Feature Aggregation
Yichao Yan, Bingbing Ni, Xiaokang Yang · 2017
Fine-grained object recognition is challenging due to large intra-class variation and inter-class ambiguity. A good algorithm should be able to: 1) discover discriminative local details and 2) align and aggregate these local discriminative patch-level features in an effective way to facilitate object level classification. Towards this end, we propose a novel local feature discovery, discriminative alignment and aggregation framework, inspired by the recent success of deep recurrent attention model. First, we develop a novel attribute-guided attentive network to sequentially discover informative parts/regions, by seeking a good registration between attentive regions and predefined object attributes. This could be considered as a semantic guided salient region discovery and alignment network, which might be more robust than conventional attention model. Second, these discovered regions are actively and progressively fed into a recurrent neural network, to yield the object-level representation. This could be considered as a discriminant aggregation network and informative patch-level features are propagated and accumulated to the deeper nodes of the recurrent network for final classification. We extensively test our framework on two fine-grained image benchmarks and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.