  Fine-grained visual categorization is to recognize hundreds of subcategories
belonging to the same basic-level category, which is a highly challenging task
due to the quite subtle and local visual distinctions among similar
subcategories. Most existing methods generally learn part detectors to discover
discriminative regions for better categorization performance. However, not all
parts are beneficial and indispensable for visual categorization, and the
setting of part detector number heavily relies on prior knowledge as well as
experimental validation. As is known to all, when we describe the object of an
image via textual descriptions, we mainly focus on the pivotal characteristics,
and rarely pay attention to common characteristics as well as the background
areas. This is an involuntary transfer from human visual attention to textual
attention, which leads to the fact that textual attention tells us how many and
which parts are discriminative and significant to categorization. So textual
attention could help us to discover visual attention in image. Inspired by
this, we propose a fine-grained visual-textual representation learning (VTRL)
approach, and its main contributions are: (1) Fine-grained visual-textual
pattern mining devotes to discovering discriminative visual-textual pairwise
information for boosting categorization performance through jointly modeling
vision and text with generative adversarial networks (GANs), which
automatically and adaptively discovers discriminative parts. (2) Visual-textual
representation learning jointly combines visual and textual information, which
preserves the intra-modality and inter-modality information to generate
complementary fine-grained representation, as well as further improves
categorization performance.
