Attending Category Disentangled Global Context for Image Classification

In this paper, we propose a general framework for image classification using the attention mechanism and global context, which could incorporate with various network architectures to improve their performance. To investigate the capability of the global context, we compare four mathematical models and observe the global context encoded in the category disentangled conditional generative model could give more guidance as "know what is task irrelevant will also know what is relevant". Based on this observation, we define a novel Category Disentangled Global Context (CDGC) and devise a deep network to obtain it. By attending CDGC, the baseline networks could identify the objects of interest more accurately, thus improving the performance. We apply the framework to many different network architectures and compare with the state-of-the-art on four publicly available datasets. Extensive results validate the effectiveness and superiority of our approach. Code will be made public upon paper acceptance.

Keke Tang, Guodong Wei, Runnan Chen, Jie Zhu, Zhaoquan Gu, Wenping Wang · 2018