English

Attention Mechanisms in Computer Vision: A Survey

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2022-07-06 v1

Abstract

Humans can naturally and effectively find salient regions in complex scenes. Motivated by this observation, attention mechanisms were introduced into computer vision with the aim of imitating this aspect of the human visual system. Such an attention mechanism can be regarded as a dynamic weight adjustment process based on features of the input image. Attention mechanisms have achieved great success in many visual tasks, including image classification, object detection, semantic segmentation, video understanding, image generation, 3D vision, multi-modal tasks and self-supervised learning. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of various attention mechanisms in computer vision and categorize them according to approach, such as channel attention, spatial attention, temporal attention and branch attention; a related repository https://github.com/MenghaoGuo/Awesome-Vision-Attentions is dedicated to collecting related work. We also suggest future directions for attention mechanism research.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2111.07624,
  title  = {Attention Mechanisms in Computer Vision: A Survey},
  author = {Meng-Hao Guo and Tian-Xing Xu and Jiang-Jiang Liu and Zheng-Ning Liu and Peng-Tao Jiang and Tai-Jiang Mu and Song-Hai Zhang and Ralph R. Martin and Ming-Ming Cheng and Shi-Min Hu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2111.07624},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

27 pages, 9 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-24T07:38:29.465Z