Learning Deep Features for Discriminative Localization

Bolei Zhou, Aditya Khosla, Agata Lapedriza, Aude Oliva, Antonio Torralba; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2016, pp. 2921-2929

In this work, we revisit the global average pooling layer proposed in [13], and shed light on how it explicitly enables the convolutional neural network (CNN) to have remarkable localization ability despite being trained on image-level labels. While this technique was previously proposed as a means for regularizing training, we find that it actually builds a generic localizable deep representation that exposes the implicit attention of CNNs on image. Despite the apparent simplicity of global average pooling, we are able to achieve 37.1% top-5 error for object localization on ILSVRC 2014 without training on any bounding box annotation. We demonstrate that our network is able to localize the discriminative image regions on a variety of tasks despite not being trained for them.