EViT: An Eagle Vision Transformer with Bi-Fovea Self-Attention

Because of the advancement of deep learning technology, vision transformer has demonstrated competitive performance in various computer vision tasks. Unfortunately, vision transformer still faces some challenges such as high computational complexity and absence of desirable inductive bias. To alleviate these problems, this study proposes a novel Bi-Fovea Self-Attention (BFSA) inspired by the physiological structure and characteristics of bi-fovea vision in eagle eyes. This BFSA can simulate the shallow fovea and deep fovea functions of eagle vision, enabling the network to extract feature representations of targets from coarse to fine, facilitating the interaction of multi-scale feature representations. Additionally, this study designs a Bionic Eagle Vision (BEV) block based on BFSA and CNN. It combines CNN and Vision Transformer, to enhance the network's local and global representation ability for targets. Furthermore, this study develops a unified and efficient general pyramid backbone network family, named Eagle Vision Transformers (EViTs) by stacking the BEV blocks. Experimental results on various computer vision tasks including image classification, object detection, instance segmentation and other transfer learning tasks show that the proposed EViTs perform significantly better than the baselines under similar model sizes, which exhibits faster speed on graphics processing unit compared to other models. Code will be released at https://github.com/nkusyl.