{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/attention-mechanisms-in-computer-vision-a","title":"Attention Mechanisms in Computer Vision: A Survey","arxiv_id":"2111.07624","date":"2021-11-15","proceeding":null,"authors":["Meng-Hao Guo","Tian-Xing Xu","Jiang-Jiang Liu","Zheng-Ning Liu","Peng-Tao Jiang","Tai-Jiang Mu","Song-Hai Zhang","Ralph R. Martin","Ming-Ming Cheng","Shi-Min Hu"],"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.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.07624v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2111.07624v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"attention-mechanisms-in-computer-vision-a","repo_url":"https://github.com/MenghaoGuo/Awesome-Vision-Attentions","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"image-classification","task_name":"Image Classification"},{"task_slug":"image-generation","task_name":"Image Generation"},{"task_slug":"object-detection","task_name":"Object Detection"},{"task_slug":"self-supervised-learning","task_name":"Self-Supervised Learning"},{"task_slug":"semantic-segmentation","task_name":"Semantic Segmentation"},{"task_slug":"survey","task_name":"Survey"},{"task_slug":"video-understanding","task_name":"Video Understanding"},{"task_slug":"image-classification","task_name":"image-classification"},{"task_slug":"object-detection-1","task_name":"object-detection"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2111.07624","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}