Parameter-Free Channel Attention for Image Classification and Super-Resolution

Abstract: The channel attention mechanism is a useful technique widely employed in deep convolutional neural networks to boost the performance for image processing tasks, eg, image classification and image super-resolution. It is usually designed as a parameterized sub-network and embedded into the convolutional layers of the network to learn more powerful feature representations. However, current channel attention induces more parameters and therefore leads to higher computational costs. To deal with this issue, in this work, we propose a Parameter-Free Channel Attention (PFCA) module to boost the performance of popular image classification and image super-resolution networks, but completely sweep out the parameter growth of channel attention. Experiments on CIFAR-100, ImageNet, and DIV2K validate that our PFCA module improves the performance of ResNet on image classification and improves the performance of MSRResNet on image super-resolution tasks, respectively, while bringing little growth of parameters and FLOPs.