Visual explanation enables humans to understand the decision making of deep convolutional neural network (CNN), but it is insufficient to contribute to improving CNN performance. In this paper, we focus on the attention map for visual explanation, which represents a high response value as the attention location in image recognition. This attention region significantly improves the performance of CNN by introducing an attention mechanism that focuses on a specific region in an image. In this work, we propose Attention Branch Network (ABN), which extends a response-based visual explanation model by introducing a branch structure with an attention mechanism. ABN can be applicable to several image recognition tasks by introducing a branch for the attention mechanism and is trainable for visual explanation and image recognition in an end-to-end manner. We evaluate ABN on several image recognition tasks such as image classification, fine-grained recognition, and multiple facial attribute recognition. Experimental results indicate that ABN outperforms the baseline models on these image recognition tasks while generating an attention map for visual explanation. Our code is available 1 .
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.