Pairwise Confusion for Fine-Grained Visual Classification

Fine-Grained Visual Classification (FGVC) datasets contain small sample sizes, along with significant intra-class variation and inter-class similarity. While prior work has addressed intra-class variation using localization and segmentation techniques, inter-class similarity may also affect feature learning and reduce classification performance. In this work, we address this problem using a novel optimization procedure for the end-to-end neural network training on FGVC tasks. Our procedure, called Pairwise Confusion (PC) reduces overfitting by intentionally introducing confusion in the activations. With PC regularization, we obtain state-of-the-art performance on six of the most widely-used FGVC datasets and demonstrate improved localization ability. PC is easy to implement, does not need excessive hyperparameter tuning during training, and does not add significant overhead during test time.