BCN: Batch Channel Normalization for Image Classification

Normalization techniques have been widely used in the field of deep learning due to their capability of enabling higher learning rates and are less careful in initialization. However, the effectiveness of popular normalization technologies is typically limited to specific areas. Unlike the standard Batch Normalization (BN) and Layer Normalization (LN), where BN computes the mean and variance along the (N,H,W) dimensions and LN computes the mean and variance along the (C,H,W) dimensions (N, C, H and W are the batch, channel, spatial height and width dimension, respectively), this paper presents a novel normalization technique called Batch Channel Normalization (BCN). To exploit both the channel and batch dependence and adaptively and combine the advantages of BN and LN based on specific datasets or tasks, BCN separately normalizes inputs along the (N, H, W) and (C, H, W) axes, then combines the normalized outputs based on adaptive parameters. As a basic block, BCN can be easily integrated into existing models for various applications in the field of computer vision. Empirical results show that the proposed technique can be seamlessly applied to various versions of CNN or Vision Transformer architecture. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/AfifaKhaled/BatchChannel-Normalization