Hierarchical Context Modeling Network for Landmark Recognition

Landmark recognition stands as a prominent classification challenge within the domain of vision and perception, involving the identification and localization of landmarks in images. However, existing landmark recognition methods often fall short in delivering satisfactory performance. A critical issue lies in the lack of simultaneous exploration of local, regional, and global modeling. Intuitively, the local details, regional features, and global structure within an image, especially of a building, significantly contribute to landmark recognition. To address this issue, we propose a novel approach, termed Hierarchical Context Modeling Network (HCMNet), for landmark recognition. In our methodology, we introduce a Hierarchical Context Modeling Block (HCMB) designed with a triplet-branch structure to model image context in a hierarchical manner. These branches consist of the local branch, which leverages a convolutional layer to capture local details, the regional branch focused on extracting regional features through large-kernel asymmetrical convolutional layers, and the global branch aims at encompassing the broader context by incorporating channel attention. To enhance the modeling capacity, we assemble multiple HCMBs into the HCMNet, creating a hierarchical structure. Comprehensive experiments validate the efficacy of the proposed HCMNet for landmark recognition, showcasing its superior performance compared to current methods. The proposed hierarchical context modeling approach proves instrumental in capturing the intricate features essential for accurate landmark recognition.