Awesome Fine-Grained Image Classification

I tried to condense the (main) contributions (or the used methodology) from each paper into a line or two to observe trends across years.

Also made a companion website on GitHub Pages with summaries of all papers for a year + 1-slide summary of close to 200 surveyed papers.

Paper scraping description in link.

If you have any problems, suggestions or improvements, please submit the issue or PR.

Surveys

• Fine-Grained Image Analysis With Deep Learning: A Survey. [Paper]

• A survey on deep learning-based fine-grained object classification and semantic segmentation. [Paper]

Papers

2024

• SaSPA: Advancing Fine-Grained Classification by Structure and Subject Preserving Augmentation. Michaeli E / Fried O. Reichman U, IL. arXiv 24/06. [Paper] [Project Page] [Code]

  • Class-consistent data augmentations through pipeline consisting of GPT-4 prompts and ControlNET + BLIP-Diffusion

2023

• Fine-Grained Visual Classification via Internal Ensemble Learning Transformer. Xu Q / Luo B. Anhui University, CN. Transactions on Multimedia 2023. [Paper]

  • Select intermediate tokens based on head-wise attention voting average + gaussian kernel -> multi-layer refinement, dynamic ratio of intermediate layers contributions for refinement modules

• Dual Transformer with Multi-Grained Assembly for Fine-Grained Visual Classification. Ji RY / Wu YJ. Chinese Academy of Sciences, CN. TCSVT 23. [Paper]

  • Early crop based on 1st layer attention, attention to select tokens from intermediate features, cross-attention for interactions between CLS token of global and crops and features of other branch

• Fine-grained Classification of Solder Joints with {\alpha}-skew Jensen-Shannon Divergence. Ulger F / Gokcen D. TCPMT 23. [Paper]

  • Maximize entropy to penalize overconfidence

• Shape-Aware Fine-Grained Classification of Erythroid Cells. Wang Y / Zhou Y. JLU, CN. Applied Intelligence 23. [Paper]

  • Dataset and method for fine-grained erythroid cell classification

• Test-Time Amendment with a Coarse Classifier for Fine-Grained Classification. Jain K / Gandhi V. IIIT Hyderabad, IN. arXiv 2023/02. [Paper]

  • Hierarchical prediction by taking into account predictions from coarser levels (multiplication of scores)

• Semantic Feature Integration network for Fine-grained Visual Classification. Wang H / Luo HC. Jiangnan U, CN. arXiv 23/02. [Paper]

  • Intermediate predictions classifiers + loss (similar to SAC arXiv 22 and PIM arXiv 22) + sequence of modules to refine most discriminative intermediate features

• Learning Common Rationale to Improve Self-Supervised Representation for Fine-Grained Visual Recognition Problems. Shu YY / Hengel AVD / Liu LQ. U of Adelaide, AU. arXiv 23/03. [Paper]

  • Extends SAM (ECCV 22) for self-supervised setting (add GradCAM branch trained with KD loss to predict discriminative regions

• Fine-grained Visual Classification with High-temperature Refinement and Background Suppression. Chou PY / Lin CH. National Taiwan Normal U, TW. arXiv 23/03. [Paper]

  • Extends PIM (arXiv 22) with loss to supress background (predict -1 for background regions) + KD loss between two inter classifiers

2022

• MetaFormer: A Unified Meta Framework for Fine-Grained Recognition. Diao QS / Yuan Z. ByteDance, CN. arXiv 22/03. [Paper]

  • Incorporate multimodality data as extra information (date, location, text, attributes, etc)

• Dynamic MLP for Fine-Grained Image Classification by Leveraging Geographical and Temporal Information. Yang LF / Yang J. Nanjing U of S&T, CN. CVPR 2022. [Paper]

  • Incorporate metadata (date/loc)

• Dual Cross-Attention Learning for Fine-Grained Visual Categorization and Object Re-Identification. Zhu HW / Shan Y. AMD, CN. CVPR 22. [Paper]

  • Cross-attention between selected queries and all keys/values for refinement + cross-attention for regularization (mix queries/keys/values from two images)

• SIM-Trans: Structure Information Modeling Transformer for Fine-grained Visual Categorization. Sun HB / Peng YX. Peking U, CN. ACM MM 22. [Paper]

  • Refine attention selected tokens using GCN & polar coordinates + contrastive loss for last 3 layers

• A Novel Plug-in Module for Fine-Grained Visual Classification. Chou PY / Kao WC. National Taiwan Normal U, TW. arXiv 22/02. [Paper]

  • Intermediate classifier distribution sharpness as metric to select intermediate features + GCN to combine

• ViT-NeT: Interpretable Vision Transformers with Neural Tree Decoder. Kim SW / Ko BC. Keimyung U, SK. ICML 22. [Paper]

  • Binary tree with differentiable routing and refinement at each node/leaf

• Fine-Grained Object Classification via Self-Supervised Pose Alignment. Yang XH / Tian YH. Peng Cheng Lab, CN. CVPR 22. [Paper]

  • Intermediate features classifiers with different label smoothing levels and graph matching to align parts for contrastive learning

• On the Eigenvalues of Global Covariance Pooling for Fine-grained Visual Recognition. Song Y / Wang W. U of Trento, IT. TPAMI 22. [Paper]

  • Second order methods (B-CNN) weaknesses: small eigenvalues so propose scaling factor to magnify

• Improving Fine-Grained Visual Recognition in Low Data Regimes via Self-Boosting Attention Mechanism. Shu YY / Liu LQ. U of Adelaide, AU. ECCV 22. [Paper]

  • KL divergence between CAMs and convolutional projection as auxiliary task

• SR-GNN: Spatial Relation-aware Graph Neural Network for Fine-Grained Image Categorization. Bera A / Behera A. BITS, IN / Edge Hill U, UK. TIP 22. [Paper]

  • Divide into regions, refinement with GNN and SA

• Cross-Part Learning for Fine-Grained Image Classification. Liu M / Zhao Y. Beijing Jiaotong University, CN. TIP 2022. [Paper]

  • Multi-stage processing and localization (object -> parts) + refinement

• Convolutional Fine-Grained Classification With Self-Supervised Target Relation Regularization. Liu KJ / Jia K. South China U of Technology, CN / Peng Cheng Lab, CN. arXiv 22/08. [Paper]

  • Class center + distance between graphs as self-supervised loss

• R2-Trans: Fine-Grained Visual Categorization with Redundancy Reduction. Wang Y / You XG. Huazhong U, CN. arXiv 22/04. [Paper]

  • Mask tokens based on attention + information theory inspired loss

• Knowledge Mining with Scene Text for Fine-Grained Recognition. Wang H / Liu WY. Huazhong U of Science and Technology, CN / Tencent, CN. CVPR 22. [Paper]

  • Incorporate wikipedia knowledge from scene text as additional data

• Fine-Grained Visual Classification using Self Assessment Classifier. Do T / Nguyen A. AIOZ, SN / U of Liverpool, UK. arXiv 22/05. [Paper]

  • Predict once, augment top-k predictions with class text names to predict again

• Exploiting Web Images for Fine-Grained Visual Recognition via Dynamic Loss Correction and Global Sample Selection. Liu HF / Xiu WS / Tang ZM. Nanjing U of S&T, CN. TMM 2022. [Paper]

  • Web images for fine-grained recognition

• Cross-layer Attention Network for Fine-grained Visual Categorization. Huang RR / Yang HZ. Tsinghua U, CN. arXiv 22/10 / CVPR 22 FGVC8 Workshop. [Paper]

  • Refine intermediate features with top-level and top-level with intermediate features

• Anime Character Recognition using Intermediates Feature Aggregation. Rios EA / Lai BC. National Yang Ming Chiao Tung U, TW. ISCAS 22. [Paper]

  • Concatenate ViT intermediate CLS tokens and forward through fully connected layer to aggregate intermediate features + incorporate tag information as additional data.

• Fine-grained visual classification with multi-scale features based on self-supervised attention filtering mechanism. Chen H / Ling W. Guangdong U of T, CN. Applied Intelligence 2022. [Paper]

  • Attention map filtering and multi-scale

• Bridge the Gap between Supervised and Unsupervised Learning for Fine-Grained Classification. Wang JB / Wei XS / Zhang R. Army Engineering U of PLA, CN / Nanjing U, CN. arXiv 22/03. [Paper]

  • Study on unsupervised fine-grained (no labels, clustering-based)

• PEDTrans: A fine-grained visual classification model for self-attention patch enhancement and dropout. Lin XH / Chen YF. China Agricultural U, CN. ACCV 22. [Paper]

  • Patch dropping based on similarity (outer product/bilinear pooling) + refinement of patches before transformer

• Iterative Self Knowledge Distillation -- from Pothole Classification to Fine-Grained and Covid Recognition. Peng KC. Mitsubishi MERL, US. ICASSP 22. [Paper]

  • Use student from previous iteration as teacher, recursively

• Fine-grain Inference on Out-of-Distribution Data with Hierarchical Classification. Linderman R / Chen Y. Duke U, US. NeurIPS 22 Workshop. [Paper]

  • Hierarchical OOD fine-grained with inference stopping criterion

• Semantic Guided Level-Category Hybrid Prediction Network for Hierarchical Image Classification. Wang P / Qian YT. Zhejiang University, CN. arXiv 2022/11. [Paper]

  • Hierarchical prediction taking into account “quality” (noise, occlusion, blur or low resolution) to decide classification level

• Data Augmentation Vision Transformer for Fine-grained Image Classification. Hu C / Wu WJ. Unknown affiliation. arXiv 22/11. [Paper]

  • Crops based on single-layer (5th) attention + TransFG’s PSM module between 2 layers (recursive matrix-matrix attention)

• Medical applications (COVID, kidney pathology, renal and ocular disease):

  • Self-supervision and Multi-task Learning: Challenges in Fine-Grained COVID-19 Multi-class Classification from Chest X-rays. Ridzuan M / Yaqub M. MBZUAI, AE. MIUA 22. [Paper]

  • Automatic Fine-grained Glomerular Lesion Recognition in Kidney Pathology. Nan Y / Yang G. Imperial College London, UK. Pattern Recognition 22. [Paper]

  • Holistic Fine-grained GGS Characterization: From Detection to Unbalanced Classification. Lu YZ / Huo YK. Vanderbilt U, US. Journal Medical Imaging 2022. [Paper]

  • CDNet: Contrastive Disentangled Network for Fine-Grained Image Categorization of Ocular B-Scan Ultrasound. Dan RL / Wang YQ. Hangzhou Dianzi U, CN. arXiv 22/06. [Paper]

• Snake competition methodologies:

  • Solutions for Fine-grained and Long-tailed Snake Species Recognition in SnakeCLEF 2022. Zou C / Cheng Y. Ant Group, CN. Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum 2022. [Paper]

  • Explored An Effective Methodology for Fine-Grained Snake Recognition. Huang Y / Feng JH. Huazhong U of Science and T, CN / Alibaba, CN. CLEF 22. [Paper]

2021

• First ViTs for FGIR:

  • TransFG: A Transformer Architecture for Fine-Grained Recognition. He J / Wang CH. Johns Hopkins U / ByteDance. arXiv 21/03 / AAAI 22. [Paper]

    • First to apply ViT for FGIR: overlapping patchifier convolution, recursive layer-wise matrix-matrix multiplication to aggregate attention and select features from last layer, contrastive loss

  • Feature Fusion Vision Transformer for Fine-Grained Visual Categorization. Wang J / Gao YS. U of Warwick, UK / Griffith U, AU. BMVC 21. [Paper]

    • ViT for FGIR, select intermediate tokens based on layer-wise attention

  • RAMS-Trans: Recurrent Attention Multi-scale Transformer for Fine-grained Image Recognition. Hu YQ / Xue H. Zhejiang U / Alibaba, CN. ACM MM 21. [Paper]

    • ViT for FGIR, select regions to crop based on recursive layer-wise attention matrix-matrix multiplication + individual CLS token for crops

  • Transformer with peak suppression and knowledge guidance for fine-grained image recognition. Liu XD / Han XG. Beihang U, CN. Neurocomputing 22. [Paper]

    • ViT for FGIR, mask tokens of top attention to prevent overconfident predictions, learnable class matrix to augment output

  • A free lunch from ViT: adaptive attention multi-scale fusion Transformer for fine-grained visual recognition. Zhang Y / Chen WQ. Peking U / Alibaba, CN. arXiv 21/08 ICASSP 22. [Paper]

    • ViT for FGIR, crops based on head-wise element-wise multiplications of attention heads and aggregating through SE-like mechanism to reweight different layers attentions

  • Exploring Vision Transformers for Fine-grained Classification. Conde MV / Turgutlu K. U of Valladolid, ES. CVPR Workshop 21. [Paper]

    • ViT for FGIR, attention rollout + morphological operations for recursive cropping / masking

  • Complemental Attention Multi-Feature Fusion Network for Fine-Grained Classification. Miao Z / Li H. Army Eng U of PLA, CN. Signal Proc Letters 21. [Paper]

    • Reweight Swin features based on importance and divide into two branches (discriminative and not)

  • Part-Guided Relational Transformers for Fine-Grained Visual Recognition. Zhao YF / Tian YH. Beihang U, CN. TIP 21. [Paper]

    • Transformer with positional embeddings from CNN features to refine global and part features

  • A Multi-Stage Vision Transformer for Fine-grained Image Classification. Huang Z / Zhang HB. Huaqiao U, CN. ITME 21. [Paper]

    • ViT for FGIR with pooling layer to build multiple stages in transformer

• AP-CNN: Weakly Supervised Attention Pyramid Convolutional Neural Network for Fine-Grained Visual Classification. Ding YF / Ma ZY / Ling HB. Beijing U of Posts & Telecomms, CN. TIP 21. [Paper]

  • FPN with top-down & bottom-up paths + merged ROI cropping + ROI masking

• Counterfactual Attention Learning for Fine-Grained Visual Categorization and Re-identification. Rao YM / Zhou J. Tsinghua U, CN. ICCV 21. [Paper]

  • Builds on WS-DAN (attention crop & mask) by making predictions with counterfactual (fake) attention maps to learn better attention maps

• Neural Prototype Trees for Interpretable Fine-grained Image Recognition. Nauta M/ Seifert C. University of Twente, NL. CVPR 21. [Paper]

  • Binary trees based on similarity to protoypes + pruning

• SnapMix: Semantically Proportional Mixing for Augmenting Fine-grained Data. Huang SL / Tao DC. U of Sydney, AU. AAAI 21. [Paper]

  • CutMix (cut part fron one image into another as data aug) with asymmetric crops + assign labels based on CAMs

• Intra-class Part Swapping for Fine-Grained Image Classification. Zhang LB / Huang SL / Liu W. U of Technology Sydney, AU. WACV 2021. [Paper]

  • CutMix images from same class only + affine transform guided by CAMs for mixing

• Stochastic Partial Swap: Enhanced Model Generalization and Interpretability for Fine-grained Recognition. Huang SL / Tao DC. The University of Sydney, AU. ICCV 21. [Paper]

  • Intermediate classifiers + changing features of one image with another randomly to inject noise

• Enhancing Mixture-of-Experts by Leveraging Attention for Fine-Grained Recognition. Zhang LB / Huang SL / Liu Wei. U of Technology Sydney / U of Sydney, AU. TMM 21. [Paper]

  • CutMix based on activations from last conv layer, same class only, crops also based on activations from last conv

• Multiresolution Discriminative Mixup Network for Fine-Grained Visual Categorization. Xu KR / Li YS. Xidian U, CN. TNNLS 21. [Paper]

  • Mixup based on CAM attention + distillation from multiple high resolution crops to single low resolution crop

• Context-aware Attentional Pooling (CAP) for Fine-grained Visual Classification. Behera A / Bera A. Edge Hill U, UK. AAAI 21. [Paper]

  • Combine cross-regions features with attention + LSTM + learnable pooling

• A Realistic Evaluation of Semi-Supervised Learning for Fine-Grained Classification. Su JC / Maji S. U of Massachusetts Amherst, US. CVPR 21. [Paper]

  • In depth-study on fine-grained semi-supervised learning

• MaskCOV: A random mask covariance network for ultra-fine-grained visual categorization. Yu XH / Xiong SW. Griffith U, AU / Wuhan U of T, CN. Pattern Recognition 21. [Paper]

  • Masking and shuffling of patches as data aug, predict covariance as auxiliary task

• Benchmark Platform for Ultra-Fine-Grained Visual Categorization Beyond Human Performance. Yu XQ / Xiong SW. Griffith U, AU / Wuhan U of T, CN. ICCV 21. [Paper]

  • Ultra fine-grained recognition of leaves dataset

• Human Attention in Fine-grained Classification. Rong Y / Kasneci E. University of Tübingen, DE. BMVC 21. [Paper]

  • Human attention/gaze for crops/extra modality data

• Fair Comparison: Quantifying Variance in Results for Fine-grained Visual Categorization. Gwilliam M / Farrell R. Brigham Young U, US / U of Maryland, US. WACV 21. [Paper]

  • Study on the failure of single top-1 accuracy as metric for FGIR, suggest using class variance and standard deviation and mean of multiple experiments with different random seeds

• Learning Canonical 3D Object Representation for Fine-Grained Recognition. Joung SH / Sohn KH. Yonsei U, KR. ICCV 21. [Paper]

  • Learn 3D representations as auxiliary task for fine grained recognition

• Multi-branch and Multi-scale Attention Learning for Fine-Grained Visual Categorization. Zhang F / Liu YZ. China U of Mining and T, CN. MMM 21. [Paper]

  • Features maps of multiple layers (instead of one) to guide cropping

• CLIP-Art: Contrastive Pre-training for Fine-Grained Art Classification. Conde MV / Turgutlu K. U of Valladolid, ES. CVPR Workshop 21. [Paper]

  • Applies CLIP for fine-grained art recognition

• Graph-based High-Order Relation Discovery for Fine-grained Recognition. Zhao YF / Li J. Beihang University, CN. CVPR 21. Paper]

  • Extend on bi/trilinear pooling + GCN for refining features

• Progressive Learning of Category-Consistent Multi-Granularity Features for Fine-Grained Visual Classification. Du RY / Ma ZY / Guo J. Beijing U of Posts and Telecomms, CN. TPAMI 21. [Paper]

  • Extended journal version of PMG (ECCV20): progressive training with block-based processing + pair category consistency loss between same class images

• Webly Supervised Fine-Grained Recognition: Benchmark Datasets and An Approach. Sun ZR / Wei XS / Shen HT. Nanjing U of S&T / Nanjing U, CN. ICCV 21. [Paper]

  • Dataset for fine-grained recognition with noisy web labels and method to train with noisy labels

• Re-rank Coarse Classification with Local Region Enhanced Features for Fine-Grained Image Recognition. Yang SK / Liu S / Wang CH ByteDance, CN. arXiv 21/02. [Paper]

  • Automatic hierarchy based on clustering, triplet loss to guide crops, similarity to class database to re-classify images (compared to coarse classifier)

• Progressive Co-Attention Network for Fine-grained Visual Classification. Zhang T / Ma ZY / Guo J. Beijing U of Posts and Telecomms, CN. VCIP 21. [Paper]

  • Interaction between pairs of images using bilinear pooling

• Subtler mixed attention network on fine-grained image classification. Liu C / Zhang WF. Ocean U of China, CN. Applied Intelligence 21. [Paper]

  • Spatial and channel attention on parts

• Dynamic Position-aware Network for Fine-grained Image Recognition. Wang SJ / Li HJ / Ouyang WL. Dalian U of T, CN. AAAI 21. [Paper]

  • Horizontal and vertical pooling + learnable sin/cos positional embeddings + GCN for crops

• Learning Scale-Consistent Attention Part Network for Fine-Grained Image Recognition. Liu HB / Lin WY. Shanghai Jiaotong U, CN. TMM 21. [Paper]

  • SE-like + Gumbel softmax trick + scale-consistency for parts detection + self-attention for parts relations

• Multi-branch Channel-wise Enhancement Network for Fine-grained Visual Recognition. Li GJ / Zhu FT. University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, CN. ACM MM 21. [Paper]

  • Multi-size spatial shuffling (similar to DCL (CVPR19) but with multiple sizes of shuffling)

• Fine-Grained Categorization From RGB-D Images. Tan YH / Lu K. Chinese Academy of Sciences, CN. TMM 21. [Paper]

  • Dataset and network for incorporating RGB and depth images

2020

• The Devil is in the Channels: Mutual-Channel Loss for Fine-Grained Image Classification. Chang DL / Song YZ. U of Posts and Telecomms, CN. TIP 20. [Paper]

  • Channel groups loss to make each channel group discriminative and focus on different spatial regions

• Learning Attentive Pairwise Interaction for Fine-Grained Classification. Zhuang PQ / Qiao Y. Chinese Acad. Of Sciences, CN. AAAI 20. [Paper]

  • Pairwise interactions between pairs of images from same/different class

• Fine-Grained Visual Classification via Progressive Multi-Granularity Training of Jigsaw Patches. Du RY / Guo J. U of Posts and Telecomms, CN. ECCV 20. [Paper]

  • Jigsaw puzzle for data augmentation of different network stages, training each stage progressively and classifier for each stage

• Channel Interaction Networks for Fine-Grained Image Categorization. Gao Y / Scott M. Malong Technologies, CN. AAAI 20. [Paper]

  • Trilinear pooling + contrastive loss to pull images from same class together and push images from different class apart

• ELoPE: Fine-Grained Visual Classification with Efficient Localization, Pooling and Embedding. Hanselmann H / Ney H. WTH Aachen U, DE. WACV 20. [Paper]

  • Small CNN to predict crops + embedding loss w/ class centers

• Fine-Grained Visual Classification with Efficient End-to-end Localization. Hanselmann H / Ney H. arXiv 20/05. [Paper]

  • End-to-end train of small CNN + STN

• Attentional Kernel Encoding Networks for Fine-Grained Visual Categorization. Hu YT / Zhen XT. Beihang U, CN. TCSVT 20. [Paper]

  • Cascaded attention + fourier/cosine kernel (cos of input)

• Bi-Modal Progressive Mask Attention for Fine-Grained Recognition. Song KT / Wei XS / Lu JF. Nanjing U of S&T, CN. TIP 20. [Paper]

  • Multi-stage fusion of vision (CNN) & text (LSTM) with vision-/language-only attention & cross-modality attention and intermediate classifiers

• Hierarchical Image Classification using Entailment Cone Embeddings. Dhall A / Krause A. ETH Zurich, CH. CVPR Workshop 20. [Paper]

  • Comparison on losses and embeddings for hierarchical classification

• Learning Semantically Enhanced Feature for Fine-Grained Image Classification. Luo W / Wei XS. IEEE, US. Signal Processing Letters 20. [Paper]

  • Group feature channels based on semantics and KD from global features to groups

• An Adversarial Domain Adaptation Network For Cross-Domain Fine-Grained Recognition. Wang YM / Wei XS / Zhang LJ. Nanjing U, CN / Megvii. WACV 20. [Paper]

  • Adversarial loss to distinguish domains + loss to pull features from same class together + attention binary mask for removing BG

• Group Based Deep Shared Feature Learning for Fine-grained Image Classification. Li XL / Monga V. Pennsylvania State University, US. BMVC 20. [Paper]

  • Autoencoder with class/shared center loss to divide features into class and not

• Beyond the Attention: Distinguish the Discriminative and Confusable Features For Fine-grained Image Classification. Shi XR / Liu W. Beijing U of Posts and Telecomm, CN. ACM MM 20. [Paper]

  • Divide into discriminative/confusing regions w/ SE to refine features, intermediate losses for classification, pulling features of images with same label closer (L1) and maximizing entropy of confusing features (pseudolabel of 1 to all classes -> background)

• Fine-Grained Classification via Categorical Memory Networks. Deng WJ / Zheng L. Australian National U, AU. arXiv 20/12 / TIP 22. [Paper]

  • Augment feature with class-specific memory module (learned average based on previous samples and how similar / how it reacts to new samples)

• Interpretable and Accurate Fine-grained Recognition via Region Grouping. Huang ZX / Li Y. U of Wisconsin-Madison, US. CVPR 20. [Paper]

  • Part assignment, feature refinement and weighted classification

• Filtration and Distillation: Enhancing Region Attention for Fine-Grained Visual Categorization. Liu CB / Zhang YD. U of S&T of China, CN. AAAI 20. [Paper]

  • RPN with losses for consistency between proposals from RPN and main feature extractor + KD between object and parts

• Graph-Propagation Based Correlation Learning for Weakly Supervised Fine-Grained Image Classification. Wang ZH / Li HJ / Li JJ. Dalian U of S&T, CN. AAAI 20. [Paper]

  • GCN for graph propagation for discriminative feature selection (crops) + losses for cropping

• Weakly Supervised Fine-grained Image Classification via Gaussian Mixture Model Oriented Discriminative Learning. Wang ZH / Li HJ / Li ZZ. Dalian U of T, CN. CVPR 20. [Paper]

  • Gaussian mixture model to learn low rank feature maps for selecting crops

• Category-specific Semantic Coherency Learning for Fine-grained Image Recognition. Wang SJ / Li HJ / Ouyang WL. Dalian U of T, CN. ACM MM 20. [Paper]

  • Latent attributes prediction, alignment, reordering and patch-wise attention for selecting crops

• Multi-Objective Matrix Normalization for Fine-Grained Visual Recognition. Min SB / Zhang YD. U of S&T of China, CN. TIP 20. [Paper]

  • Matrix normalization for bilinear pooling

• Power Normalizations in Fine-Grained Image, Few-Shot Image and Graph Classification. Koniusz P / Zhang HG. Australian National U, AU. TPAMI 20. [Paper]

  • Study on normalizations for B-CNN

• Fine-grained Image Classification and Retrieval by Combining Visual and Locally Pooled Textual Features. Mafla A / Karatzas D. UAB, ES. WACV 20. [Paper]

  • Extract and incorporate text in images for FGIR

• Multi-Modal Reasoning Graph for Scene-Text Based Fine-Grained Image Classification and Retrieval. Mafla A / Karatzas D. UAB, ES. arXiv 20/09 / WACV 21. [Paper]

  • Expands on previous by encoding multimodality with GCN

• Focus Longer to See Better: Recursively Refined Attention for Fine-Grained Image Classification. Shroff P / Wang ZY. Texas A&M U, US. CVPR Workshop 20. [Paper]

  • Recursive LSTM for encoding cropped features

• Fine-Grained Visual Categorization by Localizing Object Parts With Single Image. Zheng XT / Lu XQ. Chinese Acad of Sciences, CN. TMM 20. [Paper]

  • Cluster feature maps of multiple layers

• Microscopic Fine-Grained Instance Classification Through Deep Attention. Fan MR / Rittscher J. U of Oxford, UK. MICCAI 20. [Paper]

  • Attention crops for microscopic applications

2019

• Destruction and Construction Learning for Fine-Grained Image Recognition. Chen Y / Mei T. JD AI Research, CN. CVPR 19. [Paper]

  • Shuffling local regions in an image (destruction) + learning to predict original locations (construction) + adversarial loss to distinguish shuffled from not

• Looking for the Devil in the Details: Learning Trilinear Attention Sampling Network for Fine-Grained Image Recognition. Zheng HL / Luo JB. U of S&T of CN, CN. CVPR 19. [Paper]

  • Trilinear attention (〖𝑿𝑿〗^𝑻 𝑿) for crops + KD loss between crops & original

• Weakly Supervised Complementary Parts Models for Fine-Grained Image Classification From the Bottom Up. Ge WF / Yu YZ. U of Hong Kong, HK. CVPR 19. [Paper]

  • Weakly supervised detection/segmentation with Mask R-CNN, CAMs & CRFs + LSTM for aggregating features from original and crops

• See Better Before Looking Closer: Weakly Supervised Data Augmentation Network for Fine-Grained Visual Classification. Hu T / Lu Y. Chinese Academy of Sciences, CN / Microsoft. arXiv 19. [Paper]

  • Attention masking (and cropping) + moving average center loss to guide attention maps

• Selective Sparse Sampling for Fine-grained Image Recognition. Ding Y / Jiao JB. U of Chinese Academy of Sciences, CN. ICCV 19. [Paper]

  • CAMs peaks + Gaussians based on classification entropy (confidence) for resampling images (cropping with convs)

• Cross-X Learning for Fine-Grained Visual Categorization. Luo W / Lim S. South China Agricultural University, CN / FB. ICCV 19. [Paper]

  • Multiple excitations (OSME with loss to distinguish excitations) with intermediate features (FPN + KD loss between intermediate predictions)

• P-CNN: Part-Based Convolutional Neural Networks for Fine-Grained Visual Categorization. Han JW / Xu D. Northwestern Polythechnical U, CN / U of Sydney, AU. TPAMI 19. [Paper]

  • Cluster peak channel responses using K-means as part detectors

• Learning Rich Part Hierarchies With Progressive Attention Networks for Fine-Grained Image Recognition. Zheng HL / Luo JB / Mei T. Microsoft, CN. TIP 19. [Paper]

  • Journal MA-CNN w/ refinement module and iterative training

• Bidirectional Attention-Recognition Model for Fine-Grained Object Classification. Liu CB / Zhang YD. U of S&T of China, CN. TMM 19. [Paper]

  • RPN for proposals with feedback (NTS-Net like) + multiple random erasing data augmentation

• Deep Fuzzy Tree for Large-Scale Hierarchical Visual Classification. Wang Y / Li XQ. Tianjin U, CN. Trans. Fuzzy Systems 19. [Paper]

  • Fuzzy tree Based on interclass similarity for hierarchical class

• Part-Aware Fine-grained Object Categorization using Weakly Supervised Part Detection Network. Zhang YB / Wang ZX. South China U of Technology, CN. TMM 19. [Paper]

  • RPN proposals based on channel-wise peaks + self-supervised part labeling

2018

• Learning to Navigate for Fine-grained Classification. Yang Z / Wang LW. Peking U, CN. ECCV 2018. [Paper]

  • Feedback between networks, shared feature extractor between modules, RPN (Faster-RCNN) for part proposal

• Large Scale Fine-Grained Categorization and Domain-Specific Transfer Learning. Cui Y / Belongie S. Cornell University, US. CVPR 18. [Paper]

  • Importance of resolution and strategy for long-tailed and distance to capture domain similarity between datasets for better transfer learning by training on similar sources to target

• Multi-Attention Multi-Class Constraint for Fine-grained Image Recognition. Sun M / Ding ER. Baidu, CN. ECCV 18. [Paper]

  • Multi-excitation (squeeze-and-excitation) for feature maps + loss to pull features from same excitation closer and pushes features from different excitations away

• Hierarchical Bilinear Pooling for Fine-Grained Visual Recognition. Yu CJ / You XG. Huazhong U of S&T, CN . ECCV 18. [Paper]

  • Combine intermediate features by element-wise multiplications + concatenation of bilinearly pooled outputs

• Deep Attention-Based Spatially Recursive Networks for Fine-Grained Visual Recognition. Wu L / Wang Y. U of Queensland, AU. Trans. Cybernetics 18. [Paper]

  • Bilinear pooling w/o sum (outer product only not matrix mult)+ FC +softmax for attention + 2D spatial LSTM with neighborhood to aggregate features

• Mask-CNN: Localizing Parts and Selecting Descriptors for Fine-Grained Image Recognition. Wei XS / Wu JX. Nanjing University, CN. arXiv 16/05 (Submitted to NIPS16) / Pattern Recognition 2018/04. [Paper]

  • FCN for segmentation of parts + descriptor selection for GAP/GMP

• Maximum-Entropy Fine-Grained Classification. Dubey A / Naik N. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, US. NIPS 18. [Paper]

  • Prevent overconfidence with maximum-entropy loss + definition of fine-grained based on diversity

• Fine-Grained Image Classification Using Modified DCNNs Trained by Cascaded Softmax and Generalized Large-Margin Losses. Shi WW. Xian Jiaotong U, CH. TNNLS18. [Paper]

  • Multi objective classification with cascaded FC classifiers for each hierarchy level + loss to bring same fine-grained class together and same coarse class closer than different coarse

2017

• Look Closer to See Better: Recurrent Attention Convolutional Neural Network for Fine-grained Image Recognition. Fu JF / Zheng HL / Mei T. Microsoft / U of S&T of China, CN. CVPR 17. [Paper]

  • Recurrent CNN with intra-scale classification loss and inter-scale pairwise ranking loss to enforce finer-scale to generate more confident predictions

• Learning Multi-Attention Convolutional Neural Network for Fine-Grained Image Recognition. Zheng HL / Mei T / Luo JB. U of S&T of China, CN / Microsoft. ICCV 17. [Paper]

  • Channel grouping module to select multiple parts from CNN feature maps + loss for compact distribution and diversity with geometric constraints

• Object-Part Attention Model for Fine-Grained Image Classification. Peng YX / Zhao JJ. Peking U, CN. arXiv 17/04 / TIP 18. [Paper]

  • Propose automatic object localization via saliency extraction (CAM) for localizing objects, object-part spatial constraints and clustering of parts based on clustered intermediate CNN filters

• Low-Rank Bilinear Pooling for Fine-Grained Classification. Kong S / Fowlkes C. University of California Irvine, US. CVPR 17. [Paper]

  • Bilinear pooling with low-dimensionality projection (extra FC layer)

• Pairwise Confusion for Fine-Grained Visual Classification. Dubey A / Naik N. MIT, US. arXiv 17/05 / ECCV 18. [Paper]

  • Euclidean Distance loss which “confuses” network by adding a regularization term which minimizes distance between two images in mini-batch

• Bilinear Convolutional Neural Networks for Fine-Grained Visual Recognition. Lin T / Maji S. University of Massachusetts Amherst, US. TPAMI 2017. 177. [Paper]

  • Extension and analysis of bilinear pooling

• Fine-grained Image Classification via Combining Vision and Language. He XT / Peng YX. Peking U, CN. CVPR 17. [Paper]

  • Vision (GoogleNet) & language (CNN-RNN) two-stream network

• Higher-Order Integration of Hierarchical Convolutional Activations for Fine-Grained Visual Categorization. Cai SJ / Zhang L. HK Polytechnic University, HK. ICCV 17. [Paper]

  • Bilinear pooling for multiple layers using 1x1 Convs and concatenating intermediate outputs

• The Devil is in the Tails: Fine-grained Classification in the Wild. Horn GV / Perona P. Caltech, US. ArXiv 2017/09. [Paper]

  • Discussion on challenges related to long-tailed fine-grained classification

• BoxCars: Improving Fine-Grained Recognition of Vehicles using 3D Bounding Boxes in Traffic Surveillance. Sochor J / Herout A. Brno U of T, CZ. Transactions on ITS 17. [Paper]

  • Automatic 3D BBox estimation for car recognition

2016

• Diversified Visual Attention Networks for Fine-Grained Object Classification. Zhao B / Yan SC. Southwest Jiaotong U, CN. arXiv 16/06 / TMM 17. [Paper]

  • Multi-scale canvas for CNN extractor + LSTM to refine CNN predictions across time steps

• Learning a Discriminative Filter Bank Within a CNN for Fine-Grained Recognition. Wang YM / Davis LS. University of Maryland, US. arXiv 16/11 / CVPR 18. [Paper]

  • Two stream head: global (original) and part with 1x1 Conv, spatial global max pooling, and filter grouping/pooling to focus on most discriminative parts

• Picking Deep Filter Responses for Fine-grained Image Recognition. Zhang XP / Tian Q. Shanghai Jiao Tong U, CN. CVPR 16. [Paper]

  • Selecting deep filters which react to parts + spatial-weighting of Fisher Vector

• BoxCars: 3D Boxes as CNN Input for Improved Fine-Grained Vehicle Recognition. Sochor J / Havel J. Brno U of T, CZ. CVPR 16. [Paper]

  • 3D BBox, vehicle orientation, and shape as extra data

• Weakly Supervised Fine-Grained Categorization With Part-Based Image Representation. Zhang Y / Do M. A*SATR, SN. TIP 16. [Paper]

  • Convolutional filters for part proposal + Fisher Vector clusters for selecting useful parts + normalized FV concatenation from different scale parts

• Mining Discriminative Triplets of Patches for Fine-Grained Classification. Wang YM / Davis LS. U of Maryland, US. CVPR 16. [Paper]

  • Triplets of patches with geometric constraints to aid mid-level representations

• Fully Convolutional Attention Networks for Fine-Grained Recognition. Liu X / Lin YQ. Baidu, CN. arXiv 16/03. [Paper]

  • Simultaneously compute parts without recursion using reinforcement learning

2015

• Bilinear CNN Models for Fine-grained Visual Recognition. Lin TY / Maji S. U of Massachusetts, US. ICCV 15. [Paper]

  • Outer product of (two) CNN feature maps (bilinear vector) as input to classifier

• Fine-Grained Recognition Without Part Annotations. Krause J / Fei-Fei L. Stanford U, US. CVPR 15. [Paper]

  • Alignment by segmentation and pose graphs based on neighbors (highest cosine similarity of CNN features) to generate parts

• Part-Stacked CNN for Fine-Grained Visual Categorization. Huang SL / Zhang Y. U of Technology Sydney, AU. arXiv 15/12 / CVPR 16. [Paper]

  • Directly perform part-based classification on detected part locations from output feature maps using FCN, shared features, two stage training

• Deep LAC: Deep localization, alignment and classification for fine-grained recognition. Lin D / Jia JY. CVPR 15. Chinese U of Hong Kong, HK. [Paper]

  • Backprop-able localization + alignment based on templates (clustered from train set)

• Fine-Grained Categorization and Dataset Bootstrapping Using Deep Metric Learning with Humans in the Loop. Cui Y / Belongie S. Cornell U, US. arXiv 15/12 / CVPR 16. [Paper]

  • Triplet loss with sampling strategy for hard negatives and utilizing web data (CNN recognition-based + human verified)

• Multiple Granularity Descriptors for Fine-Grained Categorization. Wang DQ / Zhang Z. Fudan U, CN. ICCV 15. [Paper]

  • Detectors and classifiers for each level of class granularity / hierarchy

• Hyper-class Augmented and Regularized Deep Learning for Fine-grained Image Classification. Xie SN / Lin YQ. UC San Diego, US. CVPR 15. [Paper]

  • Web data and other datasets based on hyperclasses (dogs & orientation of cars) + auxiliary loss to predict hyperclasses

• Fine-Grained Image Classification by Exploring Bipartite-Graph Labels. Zhou F / Lin YQ. NEC Labs, US. arXiv 15/12 / CVPR 16. [Paper]

  • Jointly model fine-grained clases with pre-defined coarse classes (attributes / tags such as ingredients or macro-categories)

• A Fine-Grained Image Categorization System by Cellet-Encoded Spatial Pyramid Modeling. Zhang LM / Li XL. National U of Singapore, SN. TIE 15. [Paper]

  • Traditional encoding

2014

• DeCAF: A Deep Convolutional Activation Feature for Generic Visual Recognition. Donahue J / Darrell T. UC Berkeley, US. ICML 2014. [Paper]

  • CNN Features + Part Localization

• Part-based R-CNNs for Fine-grained Category Detection. Zhang N / Darrell T. UC Berkeley, US. CVPR 14. [Paper]

  • Extends R-CNN to Detect Parts with Geometric Constraints

• Evaluation of Output Embeddings for Fine-Grained Image Classification. Akata Z / Schiele B. Max Planck Institute for Informatics, DE. arXiv 14/09 / CVPR 15. [Paper]

  • Learning from Web Text + Text-Based Zero-Shot Classification

• The application of two-level attention models in deep convolutional neural network for fine-grained image classification. Xiao TJ / Zhang Z. Peking U, CN. arXiv 14/11 / CVPR 15. [Paper]

  • Bounding-Box Free Cropping (Weakly Supervised) via Multi-Stage Architecture

• Bird Species Categorization Using Pose Normalized Deep Convolutional Nets. Branson S / Perona P. Caltech, US. BMVC 14. [Paper]

  • Pose-Normalized CNN + Fine-tuning

• Attention for Fine-Grained Categorization. Sermanet P / Real E. Google. arxiv 14/12 / ICLR 15 Workshop. [Paper]

  • Large-Scale Pretraining on CNN + RNN Attention for Weakly Supervised Crops

• Learning Category-Specific Dictionary and Shared Dictionary for Fine-Grained Image Categorization. Gao SH / Ma Y. Advanced Digital Sciences, SN. TIP 14. [Paper]

  • Category Specific and Shared Codebooks

• Jointly Optimizing 3D Model Fitting and Fine-Grained Classification. Lin YL / Davis LS. National Taiwan U, TW. ECCV 14. [Paper]

  • 3D Model Fitting as Auxiliary Task

• Fine-grained visual categorization via multi-stage metric learning. Qian Q / Lin YQ. Michigan State U, US. arXiv 14/02 / CVPR 15. [Paper]

  • Multi-Stage Distance Metric (Pull Positive Pairs and Push Negative Pairs, Contrastive-like) + KNN Classifier

• Revisiting the Fisher vector for fine-grained classification. Gosselin PH / Jegou H / Perronnin F. ETIS ENSEA / Inria, FR. Pattern Recognition Letters 2014. [Paper]

  • Fisher Vector Scaling for FGIR

• Learning Features and Parts for Fine-Grained Recognition. Krause J / Fei-Fei L. Stanford U, US. CVPR 14. [Paper]

  • CNN + Unsupervised Part Discovery for Focusing on CNN Regions (No multi-stage)

• Nonparametric Part Transfer for Fine-Grained Recognition. Goring C / Denzler J. University Jena, DE. CVPR 14. [Paper]

  • Train images with similar shape to current image then transfer part annotations

2013

• POOF: Part-Based One-vs.-One Features for Fine-Grained Categorization, Face Verification, and Attribute Estimation. Berg T / Belhumeur P. Columbia U, US. CVPR 13. [Paper]

  • Align two images, divide into small patches, classify and distinguish between patches, select most discriminative then classify again

• Fine-Grained Crowdsourcing for Fine-Grained Recognition. Deng J / Fei-Fei L. CVPR 13. [Paper]

  • Crowdsource discriminative regions and algorithm to make use of them

• Symbiotic Segmentation and Part Localization for Fine-Grained Categorization. Chai YN / Zisserman A. U of Oxford, UK. ICCV 13. [Paper]

  • Joint loss for parts + foreground / background segmentation

• Deformable Part Descriptors for Fine-Grained Recognition and Attribute Prediction. Zhang N / Darrel T. UC Berkeley, US. ICCV 13. [Paper]

  • Part localization + pose normalization

• Efficient Object Detection and Segmentation for Fine-Grained Recognition. Angelova A / Zhu SH. NEC Labs America, US. CVPR 13. [Paper]

  • Detect and segment object then crop

• Fine-Grained Categorization by Alignments. Gavves E / Tuytelaars T. U of Amsterdam, ICCV 13. [Paper]

  • Align images then predict parts based on similar images in train set

• Style Finder : Fine-Grained Clothing Style Recognition and Retrieval. Di W / Sundaresan N. UC San Diego, US. CVPR Workshop 13. [Paper]

  • Clothing dataset

• Hierarchical Part Matching for Fine-Grained Visual Categorization. Xie LX / Zhang B. Tsinghua U, CN. ICCV 13. [Paper]

  • Segmentation into semantic parts + combining mid-level features

• Multi-level Discriminative Dictionary Learning towards Hierarchical Visual Categorization. Shen L / Huang QM. U of Chinese Academy of Sciences, CN. CVPR 13. [Paper]

  • Hierarchical classification

• Vantage Feature Frames for Fine-Grained Categorization. Sfar A / Geman D. INRIA Saclay. CVPR 13. [Paper]

  • Find points and orientation from which to distinguish fine-grained details (inspired by experts approach)

• Con-text: text detection using background connectivity for fine-grained object classification. Karaoglu S / Gevers T. U of Amsterdam, NL. ACM MM 13. [Paper]

  • Text detection (foreground) by reconstructing background using morphology then substract background

2012

• Discovering localized attributes for fine-grained recognition. Duan K / Grauman K. Indiana U, US. CVPR 12. [Paper]

  • Detection of human interpretable attributes

• Unsupervised Template Learning for Fine-Grained Object Recognition. Shapiro L / Yang SL. U of Washington, US. NIPS 12. [Paper]

  • Template detection and use them to align images

• A codebook-free and annotation-free approach for fine-grained image categorization. Yao BP / Fei-Fei L. Stanford U, US. CVPR 12. [Paper]

  • Template-based similarity matching between random templates

2011

• Combining randomization and discrimination for fine-grained image categorization. Yao BP. / Fei-Fei L. Stanford U, US. CVPR 11. [Paper]

  • Random forest + discriminative trees

• Fisher Vectors for Fine-Grained Visual Categorization. Sanchez J / Akata Z. Xerox. FGVC Workshop in CVPR 11. [Paper]

  • Fisher vectors

Datasets

• SkinCon: A skin disease dataset densely annotated by domain experts for fine-grained model debugging and analysis [Paper]

• GrainSpace: A Large-scale Dataset for Fine-grained and Domain-adaptive Recognition of Cereal Grains [Paper]

• FAIR1M: A Benchmark Dataset for Fine-grained Object Recognition in High-Resolution Remote Sensing Imagery [Paper]

• Yoga-82: A New Dataset for Fine-grained Classification of Human Poses [Paper]

• Building a bird recognition app and large scale dataset with citizen scientists: The fine print in fine-grained dataset collection [Paper]

• A large-scale car dataset for fine-grained categorization and verification [Paper]

• Birdsnap: Large-Scale Fine-Grained Visual Categorization of Birds [Paper]

• 3D Object Representations for Fine-Grained Categorization [Paper]

• Fine-Grained Visual Classification of Aircraft [Paper]

• Novel Dataset for Fine-Grained Image Categorization : Stanford Dogs [Paper]

FGIR-OSI

Acknowledgement

Thanks Awesome-Crowd-Counting for the template.