CF-CNN: Coarse-to-Fine Convolutional Neural Network

Abstract

In this paper, we present a coarse-to-fine convolutional neural network (CF-CNN) for learning multilabel classes. The basis of the proposed CF-CNN is a disjoint grouping method that first creates a class group with hierarchical association, and then assigns a new label to a class belonging to each group so that each class acquires multiple labels. CF-CNN consists of one main network and two subnetworks. Each subnetwork performs coarse prediction using the group labels created by the disjoint grouping method. The main network includes a refine convolution layer and performs fine prediction to fuse the feature maps acquired from the subnetwork. The generated class set in the upper level has the same classification boundary to that in the lower level. Since the classes belonging to the upper level label are classified with a higher priority, parameter optimization becomes easier. In experimental results, the proposed method is applied to various classification tasks to show a higher classification accuracy by up to 3% with a much smaller number of parameters without modification of the baseline model.