FcaNet: Frequency Channel Attention Networks

Attention mechanism, especially channel attention, has gained great success in the computer vision field. Many works focus on how to design efficient channel attention mechanisms while ignoring a fundamental problem, i.e., using global average pooling (GAP) as the unquestionable pre-processing method. In this work, we start from a different view and rethink channel attention using frequency analysis. Based on the frequency analysis, we mathematically prove that the conventional GAP is a special case of the feature decomposition in the frequency domain. With the proof, we naturally generalize the pre-processing of channel attention mechanism in the frequency domain and propose FcaNet with novel multi-spectral channel attention. The proposed method is simple but effective. We can change only one line of code in the calculation to implement our method within existing channel attention methods. Moreover, the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results compared with other channel attention methods on image classification, object detection, and instance segmentation tasks. Our method could improve by 1.8% in terms of Top-1 accuracy on ImageNet compared with the baseline SENet-50, with the same number of parameters and the same computational cost. Our code and models will be made publicly available.