The attention mechanism has gained significant recognition in the field of computer vision due to its ability to effectively enhance the performance of deep neural networks. However, existing methods often struggle to effectively utilize spatial information or, if they do, they come at the cost of reducing channel dimensions or increasing the complexity of neural networks. In order to address these limitations, this paper introduces an Efficient Local Attention (ELA) method that achieves substantial performance improvements with a simple structure. By analyzing the limitations of the Coordinate Attention method, we identify the lack of generalization ability in Batch Normalization, the adverse effects of dimension reduction on channel attention, and the complexity of attention generation process. To overcome these challenges, we propose the incorporation of 1D convolution and Group Normalization feature enhancement techniques. This approach enables accurate localization of regions of interest by efficiently encoding two 1D positional feature maps without the need for dimension reduction, while allowing for a lightweight implementation. We carefully design three hyperparameters in ELA, resulting in four different versions: ELA-T, ELA-B, ELA-S, and ELA-L, to cater to the specific requirements of different visual tasks such as image classification, object detection and sementic segmentation. ELA can be seamlessly integrated into deep CNN networks such as ResNet, MobileNet, and DeepLab. Extensive evaluations on the ImageNet, MSCOCO, and Pascal VOC datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed ELA module over current state-of-the-art methods in all three aforementioned visual tasks.

本篇论文提出了一种高效的局部注意力(ELA)方法，该方法通过引入1D卷积和分组归一化特征增强技术，实现了在不通过降维的情况下，精确定位感兴趣区域的目标，并且具备轻量级的实现。在ImageNet、MSCOCO和Pascal VOC数据集上的广泛评估表明，ELA模块在图像分类、目标检测和语义分割等三个视觉任务中优于当前最先进的方法。

ELA：深度卷积神经网络的高效局部注意力