Attention Branch Network: Learning of Attention Mechanism for Visual Explanation

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…