Zero-Shot Image Classification Method Based on Attention Mechanism and Semantic Information Fusion

Abstract

The zero-shot image classification (ZSIC) is designed to solve the classification problem when the sample is very small, or the category is missing. A common method is to use attribute or word vectors as a priori category features (auxiliary information) and complete the domain transfer from training of seen classes to recognition of unseen classes by building a mapping between image features and a priori category features. However, feature extraction of the whole image lacks discrimination, and the amount of information of single attribute features or word vector features of categories is insufficient, which makes the matching degree between image features and prior class features not high and affects the accuracy of the ZSIC model. To this end, a spatial attention mechanism is designed, and an image feature extraction module based on this attention mechanism is constructed to screen critical features with discrimination. A semantic information fusion method based on matrix decomposition is proposed, which first decomposes the attribute features and then fuses them with the extracted word vector features of a dataset to achieve information expansion. Through the above two improvement measures, the classification accuracy of the ZSIC model for unseen images is improved. The experimental results on public datasets verify the effect and superiority of the proposed methods.

Keywords

• image classification
• attention mechanism
• matrix decomposition
• attributes
• word vectors