Spatial Channel Attention for Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

Recently, the attention mechanism combining spatial and channel information has been widely used in various deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs), proving its great potential in improving model performance. However, this usually uses 2D global pooling operations to compress spatial information or scaling methods to reduce the computational overhead in channel attention. These methods will result in severe information loss. Therefore, we propose a Spatial channel attention mechanism that captures cross-dimensional interaction, which does not involve dimensionality reduction and brings significant performance improvement with negligible computational overhead. The proposed attention mechanism can be seamlessly integrated into any convolutional neural network since it is a lightweight general module. Our method achieves a performance improvement of 2.08% on ResNet and 1.02% on MobileNetV2 in top-one error rate on the ImageNet dataset.