README.md

Analyzing Visual Attention Mechanisms for Handwritten Digit Classification

Visual Attention Analysis with Spatial Transformer Networks for Handwritten Digit Classification on MNIST

Getting Started

Step 1: Clone this repository and change directory to repository root

git clone https://github.com/biswassanket/STN_FGC.git
cd STN_FGC

Step 2: Create a conda environment to run the above project and install required dependencies.

• To create conda environment: conda env create -f environment.yml

Step 3: Activate the conda environment

conda activate stn_fgc

Step 4: Training STN Models on MNIST

• To run base STN with standard Conv layers:

$ python main.py --stn

• To run STN with Coordconv layers:

$ python main.py --stncoordconv --localization

Step 5: Training ViT Model on MNIST

$ python main.py --vit

Step 6: For the detailed analysis on the experimented visual attention models, here is the complete report

Results

Model Variant	Accuracy	Best Epoch
Simple Conv	0.9879	48
Simple STN+Conv	0.9889	44
Simple STN+CoordConv	0.9850	43
Simple STN+CoordConv+localization	0.9910	47
Simple STN=CoordConv+localization+r-channel	0.9868	40
Vision Transformers	0.9844	49

Authors

• Sanket Biswas

Conclusion

Enjoyed playing with the models. Stay tuned, more implementations of visual attention models on fine-grained image classification task is coming soon. Thank you and sorry for the bugs,as usual.