Multi-label classification based on attention mechanism and semantic dependencies

Multi-label image classification which is a generalization of the single-label image classification is aimed to assign multi-labels to the image to full express the specific visual concepts contained in the image. We propose a method based on convolutional neural networks, which combines attention mechanism and semantic relevance, to solve the multi label problem. Firstly, we use convolution neural network to extract features. Then, we apply the attention mechanism to obtain the correspondence between the label and channel of the feature map. Finally, we explore the channel-wise correlation which is essentially the semantic dependencies between labels by means of supervised learning. The experimental results show that the proposed method can exploit the dependencies between multiple tags to improve the performance of multi label image classification.