  Inspired by the fact that human brains can emphasize discriminative parts of
the input and suppress irrelevant ones, substantial local mechanisms have been
designed to boost the development of computer vision. They can not only focus
on target parts to learn discriminative local representations, but also process
information selectively to improve the efficiency. In terms of application
scenarios and paradigms, local mechanisms have different characteristics. In
this survey, we provide a systematic review of local mechanisms for various
computer vision tasks and approaches, including fine-grained visual
recognition, person re-identification, few-/zero-shot learning, multi-modal
learning, self-supervised learning, Vision Transformers, and so on.
Categorization of local mechanisms in each field is summarized. Then,
advantages and disadvantages for every category are analyzed deeply, leaving
room for exploration. Finally, future research directions about local
mechanisms have also been discussed that may benefit future works. To the best
our knowledge, this is the first survey about local mechanisms on computer
vision. We hope that this survey can shed light on future research in the
computer vision field.
