Multiple attentional pyramid networks for Chinese herbal recognition

Chinese herbs play a critical role in Traditional Chinese Medicine. Due to different recognition granularity, they can be recognized accurately only by professionals with much experience. It is expected that they can be recognized automatically using new techniques like machine learning. However, there is no Chinese herbal image dataset available. Simultaneously, there is no machine learning method which can deal with Chinese herbal image recognition well. Therefore, this paper begins with building a new standard Chinese-Herbs dataset. Subsequently, a new Attentional Pyramid Networks (APN) for Chinese herbal recognition is proposed, where both novel competitive attention and spatial collaborative attention are proposed and then applied. APN can adaptively model Chinese herbal images with different feature scales. Finally, a new framework for Chinese herbal recognition is proposed as a new application of APN. Experiments are conducted on our constructed dataset and validate the effectiveness of our methods.