A survey of fine-grained visual categorization based on deep learning

Deep learning has achieved excellent results in various tasks in the field of computer vision, especially in fine-grained visual categorization. It aims to distinguish the subordinate categories of the label-level categories. Due to high intra-class variances and high inter-class similarity, the fine-grained visual categorization is extremely challenging. This paper first briefly introduces and analyzes the related public datasets. After that, some of the latest methods are reviewed. Based on the feature types, the feature processing methods, and the overall structure used in the model, we divide them into three types of methods: methods based on general convolutional neural network (CNN) and strong supervision of parts, methods based on single feature processing, and methods based on multiple feature processing. Most methods of the first type have a relatively simple structure, which is the result of the initial research. The methods of the other two types include models that have special structures and training processes, which are helpful to obtain discriminative features. We conduct a specific analysis on several methods with high accuracy on public datasets. In addition, we support that the focus of the future research is to solve the demand of existing methods for the large amount of the data and the computing power. In terms of technology, the extraction of the subtle feature information with the burgeoning vision transformer (ViT) network is also an important research direction.