Fine-Grained Cat Breed Recognition with Global Context Vision Transformer
Abstract
Accurate identification of cat breeds from images is a challenging task due to subtle differences in fur patterns, facial structure, and color. In this paper, we present a deep learning-based approach for classifying cat breeds using a subset of the Oxford-IIIT Pet Dataset, which contains high-resolution images of various domestic breeds. We employed the Global Context Vision Transformer (GCViT) architecture-tiny for cat breed recognition. To improve model generalization, we used extensive data augmentation, including rotation, horizontal flipping, and brightness adjustment. Experimental results show that the GCViT-Tiny model achieved a test accuracy of 92.00% and validation accuracy of 94.54%. These findings highlight the effectiveness of transformer-based architectures for fine-grained image classification tasks. Potential applications include veterinary diagnostics, animal shelter management, and mobile-based breed recognition systems. We also provide a hugging face demo at https://huggingface.co/spaces/bfarhad/cat-breed-classifier.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2602.07534,
title = {Fine-Grained Cat Breed Recognition with Global Context Vision Transformer},
author = {Mowmita Parvin Hera and Md. Shahriar Mahmud Kallol and Shohanur Rahman Nirob and Md. Badsha Bulbul and Jubayer Ahmed and M. Zhourul Islam and Hazrat Ali and Mohammmad Farhad Bulbul},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.07534},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
4 pages, accepted at International Conference on Computer and Information Technology (ICCIT) 2025