Applied Sciences (Oct 2023)

RepVGG-SimAM: An Efficient Bad Image Classification Method Based on RepVGG with Simple Parameter-Free Attention Module

  • Zengyu Cai,
  • Xinyang Qiao,
  • Jianwei Zhang,
  • Yuan Feng,
  • Xinhua Hu,
  • Nan Jiang

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/app132111925
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 13, no. 21
p. 11925

Abstract

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With the rapid development of Internet technology, the number of global Internet users is rapidly increasing, and the scale of the Internet is also expanding. The huge Internet system has accelerated the spread of bad information, including bad images. Bad images reflect the vulgar culture of the Internet. They will not only pollute the Internet environment and impact the core culture of society but also endanger the physical and mental health of young people. In addition, some criminals use bad images to induce users to download software containing computer viruses, which also greatly endanger the security of cyberspace. Cyberspace governance faces enormous challenges. Most existing methods for classifying bad images face problems such as low classification accuracy and long inference times, and these limitations are not conducive to effectively curbing the spread of bad images and reducing their harm. To address this issue, this paper proposes a classification method (RepVGG-SimAM) based on RepVGG and a simple parameter-free attention mechanism (SimAM). This method uses RepVGG as the backbone network and embeds the SimAM attention mechanism in the network so that the neural network can obtain more effective information and suppress useless information. We used pornographic images publicly disclosed by data scientist Alexander Kim and violent images collected from the internet to construct the dataset for our experiment. The experimental results prove that the classification accuracy of the method proposed in this paper can reach 94.5% for bad images, that the false positive rate of bad images is only 4.3%, and that the inference speed is doubled compared with the ResNet101 network. Our proposed method can effectively identify bad images and provide efficient and powerful support for cyberspace governance.

Keywords