Over the past few years, a significant progress has been made in deep
convolutional neural networks (CNNs)-based image recognition. This is mainly
due to the strong ability of such networks in mining discriminative object pose
and parts information from texture and shape. This is often inappropriate for
fine-grained visual classification (FGVC) since it exhibits high intra-class
and low inter-class variances due to occlusions, deformation, illuminations,
etc. Thus, an expressive feature representation describing global structural
information is a key to characterize an object/ scene. To this end, we propose
a method that effectively captures subtle changes by aggregating context-aware
features from most relevant image-regions and their importance in
discriminating fine-grained categories avoiding the bounding-box and/or
distinguishable part annotations. Our approach is inspired by the recent
advancement in self-attention and graph neural networks (GNNs) approaches to
include a simple yet effective relation-aware feature transformation and its
refinement using a context-aware attention mechanism to boost the
discriminability of the transformed feature in an end-to-end learning process.
Our model is evaluated on eight benchmark datasets consisting of fine-grained
objects and human-object interactions. It outperforms the state-of-the-art
approaches by a significant margin in recognition accuracy.Comment: Accepted manuscript - IEEE Transaction on Image Processin