Tackling over-smoothing in multi-label image classification using graphical convolution neural network

Abstract

The importance of the graphical convolution network in multi-label classification has grown in recent years due to its label embedding representation capabilities. The graphical convolution network is able to capture the label dependencies using the correlation between labels. However, the graphical convolution network suffers from an over-smoothing problem when the layers are increased in the network. Over-smoothing makes the nodes indistinguishable in the deep graphical convolution network. This paper proposes a normalization technique to tackle the over-smoothing problem in the graphical convolution network for multi-label classification. The proposed approach is an efficient multi-label object classifier based on a graphical convolution neural network that tackles the over-smoothing problem. The proposed approach normalizes the output of the graph such that the total pairwise squared distance between nodes remains the same after performing the convolution operation. The proposed approach outperforms the existing state-of-the-art approaches based on the results obtained from the experiments performed on MS-COCO and VOC2007 datasets. The experimentation results show that pairnorm mitigates the effect of over-smoothing in the case of using a deep graphical convolution network. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.