Information Entropy Based Feature Pooling for Convolutional Neural Networks

Weitao Wan, Jiansheng Chen, Tianpeng Li, Yiqing Huang, Jingqi Tian, Cheng Yu, Youze Xue; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2019, pp. 3405-3414

Abstract


In convolutional neural networks (CNNs), we propose to estimate the importance of a feature vector at a spatial location in the feature maps by the network's uncertainty on its class prediction, which can be quantified using the information entropy. Based on this idea, we propose the entropy-based feature weighting method for semantics-aware feature pooling which can be readily integrated into various CNN architectures for both training and inference. We demonstrate that such a location-adaptive feature weighting mechanism helps the network to concentrate on semantically important image regions, leading to improvements in the large-scale classification and weakly-supervised semantic segmentation tasks. Furthermore, the generated feature weights can be utilized in visual tasks such as weakly-supervised object localization. We conduct extensive experiments on different datasets and CNN architectures, outperforming recently proposed pooling methods and attention mechanisms in ImageNet classification as well as achieving state-of-the-arts in weakly-supervised semantic segmentation on PASCAL VOC 2012 dataset.

Related Material


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[bibtex]
@InProceedings{Wan_2019_ICCV,
author = {Wan, Weitao and Chen, Jiansheng and Li, Tianpeng and Huang, Yiqing and Tian, Jingqi and Yu, Cheng and Xue, Youze},
title = {Information Entropy Based Feature Pooling for Convolutional Neural Networks},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)},
month = {October},
year = {2019}
}