Vehicle Classification Algorithm Based on Improved Vision Transformer

Vehicle classification technology is one of the foundations in the field of automatic driving. With the development of deep learning technology, visual transformer structures based on attention mechanisms can represent global information quickly and effectively. However, due to direct image segmentation, local feature details and information will be lost. To solve this problem, we propose an improved vision transformer vehicle classification network (IND-ViT). Specifically, we first design a CNN-In D branch module to extract local features before image segmentation to make up for the loss of detail information in the vision transformer. Then, in order to solve the problem of misdetection caused by the large similarity of some vehicles, we propose a sparse attention module, which can screen out the discernible regions in the image and further improve the detailed feature representation ability of the model. Finally, this paper uses the contrast loss function to further increase the intra-class consistency and inter-class difference of classification features and improve the accuracy of vehicle classification recognition. Experimental results show that the accuracy of the proposed model on the datasets of vehicle classification BIT-Vehicles, CIFAR-10, Oxford Flower-102, and Caltech-101 is higher than that of the original vision transformer model. Respectively, it increased by 1.3%, 1.21%, 7.54%, and 3.60%; at the same time, it also met a certain real-time requirement to achieve a balance of accuracy and real time.