WideCaps: a wide attention-based capsule network for image classification

Abstract

The capsule network is a distinct and promising segment of the neural network family that has drawn attention due to its unique ability to maintain equivariance by preserving spatial relationships among the features. The capsule network has attained unprecedented success in image classification with datasets such as MNIST and affNIST by encoding the characteristic features into capsules and building a parse-tree structure. However, on datasets involving complex foreground and background regions, such as CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100, the performance of the capsule network is suboptimal due to its naive data routing policy and incompetence in extracting complex features. This paper proposes a new design strategy for capsule network architectures for efficiently dealing with complex images. The proposed method incorporates the optimal placement of the novel wide bottleneck residual block and squeeze and excitation Attention Blocks into the capsule network upheld by the modified factorized machines routing algorithm to address the defined problem. This setup allows channel interdependencies at almost no computational cost, thereby enhancing the representation ability of capsules on complex images. We extensively evaluate the performance of the proposed model on the five publicly available datasets, namely the CIFAR-10, Fashion MNIST, Brain Tumor, SVHN, and the CIFAR-100 datasets. The proposed method outperformed the top-5 capsule network-based methods on Fashion MNIST, CIFAR-10, SVHN, Brain Tumor, and gave a highly competitive performance on the CIFAR-100 datasets. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.