Visual-textual Attention Driven Fine-grained Representation Learning

Fine-grained image classification is to recognize hundreds of subcategories belonging to the same basic-level category, which is a highly challenging task due to the quite subtle visual distinctions among similar subcategories. Most existing methods generally learn part detectors to discover discriminative regions for better performance. However, not all localized parts are beneficial and indispensable for classification, and the setting for number of part detectors relies heavily on prior knowledge as well as experimental results. As is known to all, when we describe the object of an image into text via natural language, we only focus on the pivotal characteristics, and rarely pay attention to common characteristics as well as the background areas. This is an involuntary transfer from human visual attention to textual attention, which leads to the fact that textual attention tells us how many and which parts are discriminative and significant. So textual attention of natural language descriptions could help us to discover visual attention in image. Inspired by this, we propose a visual-textual attention driven fine-grained representation learning (VTA) approach, and its main contributions are: (1) Fine-grained visual-textual pattern mining devotes to discovering discriminative visual-textual pairwise information for boosting classification through jointly modeling vision and text with generative adversarial networks (GANs), which automatically and adaptively discovers discriminative parts. (2) Visual-textual representation learning jointly combine visual and textual information, which preserves the intra-modality and inter-modality information to generate complementary fine-grained representation, and further improve classification performance. Experiments on the two widely-used datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our VTA approach, which achieves the best classification accuracy.