# Enhancing Vehicle Make and Model Recognition with 3D Attention Modules

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.15398 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.15398/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 25 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Feb 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12122/) (2021)
- [CrossViT: Cross-Attention Multi-Scale Vision Transformer for Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14899/) (2021)
- [ECA-Net: Efficient Channel Attention for Deep Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03151/) (2019)
- [MaxViT: Multi-Axis Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01697/) (2022)
- [Residual Attention Network for Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.06904/) (2017)
- [Coordinate Attention for Efficient Mobile Network Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02907/) (2021)
- [Global Context Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.13375/) (2020)
- [BEFUnet: A Hybrid CNN-Transformer Architecture for Precise Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.08793/) (2024)
- [Dilated-UNet: A Fast and Accurate Medical Image Segmentation Approach using a Dilated Transformer and U-Net Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11450/) (2023)
- [Medical Image Classification with KAN-Integrated Transformers and Dilated Neighborhood Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13693/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Vehicle make and model recognition (VMMR) is a crucial component of the Intelligent Transport System, garnering significant attention in recent years. VMMR has been widely utilized for detecting suspicious vehicles, monitoring urban traffic, and autonomous driving systems. The complexity of VMMR arises from the subtle visual distinctions among vehicle models and the wide variety of classes produced by manufacturers. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), a prominent type of deep learning model, have been extensively employed in various computer vision tasks, including VMMR, yielding remarkable results. As VMMR is a fine-grained classification problem, it primarily faces inter-class similarity and intra-class variation challenges. In this study, we implement an attention module to address these challenges and enhance the model's focus on critical areas containing distinguishing features. This module, which does not increase the parameters of the original model, generates three-dimensional (3-D) attention weights to refine the feature map. Our proposed model integrates the attention module into two different locations within the middle section of a convolutional model, where the feature maps from these sections offer sufficient information about the input frames without being overly detailed or overly coarse. The performance of our proposed model, along with state-of-the-art (SOTA) convolutional and transformer-based models, was evaluated using the Stanford Cars dataset. Our proposed model achieved the highest accuracy, 90.69%, among the compared models.