Fine-Grained Image Recognition with Bio-Inspired Gradient-Aware Attention

Fine-grained image recognition is one of the key tasks in the field of computer vision. However, due to subtle inter-class differences and significant intra-class differences, it still faces severe challenges. Conventional approaches often struggle with background interference and feature degradation. To address these issues, we draw inspiration from the human visual system, which adeptly focuses on discriminative regions, to propose a bio-inspired gradient-aware attention mechanism. Our method explicitly models gradient information to guide the attention, mimicking biological edge sensitivity, thereby enhancing the discrimination between global structures and local details. Experiments on the CUB-200-2011, iNaturalist2018, nabbirds and Stanford Cars datasets demonstrated the superiority of our method, achieving Top-1 accuracy rates of 92.9%, 90.5%, 93.1% and 95.1%, respectively.