ConCA: Concentration-Aware Channel Attention for Fine-Grained Visual Recognition

📅 2026-08-30
📈 Citations: 0
✨ Influential: 0
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🤖 AI Summary
为解决细粒度视觉识别中通道注意力机制效果有限的问题,提出ConCA方法,通过结合均值和负输入熵形成双重描述符,并使用深度可分离1-D卷积多层感知器映射到每通道权重。
📝 Abstract
Lightweight channel attention mechanisms are widely used in image classification, yet their effectiveness in fine-grained visual recognition (FGVR) remains limited. Most modules summarize each channel by global average pooling (GAP), which captures activation magnitude but ignores spatial concentration, so channels with different spatial distributions but identical means receive the same descriptor. We propose Concentration-Aware Channel Attention (ConCA), which pairs the mean with a shift-invariant negative-input entropy (NegEnt), computed via a softmax over the negated activations, forming a dual descriptor that jointly encodes magnitude and concentration. A depthwise 1-D convolutional multi-layer perceptron (MLP), whose parameter count is linear in the number of channels, maps the pair to a per-channel weight. On six fine-grained benchmarks, ConCA improves over attention-free, SE-Net, and ECA-Net baselines as well as four richer descriptor-based modules under a controlled from-scratch protocol, and it generalizes across eight backbones on iNat2021-mini. These results indicate that the channel descriptor, together with the per-channel gating that maps it to attention weights, is an important but underexplored aspect of lightweight channel attention in FGVR.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

fine-grained visual recognition
channel attention
global average pooling
spatial concentration
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

Concentration-Aware
Negative-Input Entropy
Dual Descriptor
Depthwise 1-D Convolutional MLP
Fine-Grained Visual Recognition
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Yu-Sheng Liu
Department of Physics, National Kaohsiung Normal University, Kaohsiung, 824, Taiwan
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Yu-Chen Tung
Department of Physics, National Kaohsiung Normal University, Kaohsiung, 824, Taiwan