Pervasive Attentive Neural Network for Intelligent Image Classification Based on N-CDE’s

The utilization of visual attention enhances the performance of image classification tasks. Previous attentionbased models have demonstrated notable performance, but many of these models exhibit reduced accuracy when confronted with inter-class and intra-class similarities and differences. Neural-Controlled Differential Equations (N-CDE’s) and Neural Ordinary Differential Equations (NODE’s) are extensively utilized within this context. NCDE’s possesses the capacity to effectively illustrate both inter-class and intra-class similarities and differences with enhanced clarity. To this end, an attentive neural network has been proposed to generate attention maps, which uses two different types of N-CDE’s, one for adopting hidden layers and the other to generate attention values. Two distinct attention techniques are implemented including time-wise attention, also referred to as bottom N-CDE’s; and element-wise attention, called top N-CDE’s. Additionally, a training methodology is proposed to guarantee that the training problem is sufficiently presented. Two classification tasks including fine-grained visual classification and multi-label classification, are utilized to evaluate the proposed model. The proposed methodology is employed on five publicly available datasets, including CUB-200-2011, ImageNet-1K, PASCAL VOC 2007, PASCAL VOC 2012, and MS COCO. The obtained visualizations have demonstrated that N-CDE’s are better appropriate for attention-based activities in comparison to conventional NODE’s.