WaveNets: Wavelet Channel Attention Networks

Channel Attention reigns supreme as an effective technique in the field of computer vision. However, the proposed channel attention by SENet suffers from information loss in feature learning caused by the use of Global Average Pooling (GAP) to represent channels as scalars. Thus, designing effective channel attention mechanisms requires finding a s olution t o enhance features preservation in modeling channel inter-dependencies. In this work, we utilize Wavelet transform compression as a solution to the channel representation problem. We first t est wavelet transform as a standalone channel compression method. We prove that global average pooling is equivalent to the recursive approximate Haar wavelet transform. With this proof, we generalize channel attention using Wavelet compression and name it WaveNet. Implementation of our method can be embedded within existing channel attention methods with a couple of lines of code. We test our proposed method using ImageNet dataset for image classification t ask. O ur m ethod o utperforms t he baseline SENet-34, and SOTA FcaNet-34. Our code implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/hady1011/WaveNet-C.