INTS-Net: Improved Navigator-Teacher-Scrutinizer Network for Fine-Grained Visual Categorization

Abstract

Fine-grained image recognition, as a significant branch of computer vision, has become prevalent in various applications in the real world. However, this image recognition is more challenging than general image recognition due to the highly localized and subtle differences in special parts. Up to now, many classic models, including Bilinear Convolutional Neural Networks (Bilinear CNNs), Destruction and Construction Learning (DCL), etc., have emerged to make corresponding improvements. This paper focuses on optimizing the Navigator-Teacher-Scrutinizer Network (NTS-Net). The structure of NTS-Net determines its strong ability to capture subtle information areas. However, research finds that this advantage will lead to a bottleneck of the model’s learning ability. During the training process, the loss value of the training set approaches zero prematurely, which is not conducive to later model learning. Therefore, this paper proposes the INTS-Net model, in which the Stochastic Partial Swap (SPS) method is flexibly added to the feature extractor of NTS-Net. By injecting noise into the model during training, neurons are activated in a more balanced and efficient manner. In addition, we obtain a speedup of about 4.5% in test time by fusing batch normalization and convolution. Experiments conducted on CUB-200-2011 and Stanford cars demonstrate the superiority of INTS-Net.