In plain words: A small block squeezes each feature channel into one summary number, then uses those numbers to boost helpful channels and quiet useless ones. Bolted onto existing image-recognition networks, it cut the winning contest's top-five error to 2.251%, about 25% better than the year before.
Abstract · Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks
The central building block of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) is the convolution operator, which enables networks to construct informative features by fusing both spatial and channel-wise information within local receptive fields at each layer. A broad range of prior research has investigated the spatial component of this relationship, seeking to strengthen the representational power of a CNN by enhancing the quality of spatial encodings throughout its feature hierarchy. In this work, we focus instead on the channel relationship and propose a novel architectural unit, which we term the "Squeeze-and-Excitation" (SE) block, that adaptively recalibrates channel-wise feature responses by explicitly modelling interdependencies between channels. We show that these blocks can be stacked together to form SENet architectures that generalise extremely effectively across different datasets. We further demonstrate that SE blocks bring significant improvements in performance for existing state-of-the-art CNNs at slight additional computational cost. Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks formed the foundation of our ILSVRC 2017 classification submission which won first place and reduced the top-5 error to 2.251%, surpassing the winning entry of 2016 by a relative improvement of ~25%. Models and code are available at https://github.com/hujie-frank/SENet.
Jie Hu, Li Shen, Samuel Albanie, Gang Sun, Enhua Wu
arXiv:1709.01507 · cs.CV · submitted Sep 5, 2017 · updated May 16, 2019
abstract · pdf · html · journal version of the CVPR 2018 paper, accepted by TPAMI