Bilinear CNN Model for Fine-Grained Classification Based on Subcategory-Similarity Measurement

One of the challenges in fine-grained classification is that subcategories with significant similarity are hard to be distinguished due to the equal treatment of all subcategories in existing algorithms. In order to solve this problem, a fine-grained image classification method by combining a bilinear convolutional neural network (B-CNN) and the measurement of subcategory similarities is proposed. Firstly, an improved weakly supervised localization method is designed to obtain the bounding box of the main object, which allows the model to eliminate the influence of background noise and obtain more accurate features. Then, sample features in the training set are computed by B-CNN so that the fuzzing similarity matrix for measuring interclass similarities can be obtained. To further improve classification accuracy, the loss function is designed by weighting triplet loss and softmax loss. Extensive experiments implemented on two benchmarks datasets, Stanford Cars-196 and Caltech-UCSD Birds-200-2011 (CUB-200-2011), show that the newly proposed method outperforms in accuracy several state-of-the-art weakly supervised classification models.