A Dual-Structured Convolutional Neural Network with an Attention Mechanism for Image Classification

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This paper presents a dual-structured convolutional neural network (CNN) for image classification, which integrates two parallel branches: CNN-A with spatial attention and CNN-B with channel attention. The spatial attention module in CNN-A dynamically emphasizes discriminative regions by aggregating channel-wise information, while the channel attention mechanism in CNN-B adaptively recalibrates feature channel importance. The extracted features from both branches are fused through concatenation, enhancing the model’s representational capacity by capturing complementary spatial and channel-wise dependencies. Extensive experiments on a 12-class image dataset demonstrate the superiority of the proposed model over state-of-the-art methods, achieving 98.06% accuracy, 96.00% precision, and 98.01% F1-score. Despite a marginally longer training time, the model exhibits robust convergence and generalization, as evidenced by stable loss curves and high per-class recognition rates (>90%). The results validate the efficacy of dual attention mechanisms in improving feature discrimination for complex image classification tasks.