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

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.