ADINet: Attribute Driven Incremental Network for Retinal Image Classification

Retinal diseases encompass a variety of types, including different diseases and severity levels. Training a model with all possible types of disease is impractical. Dynamically training a model is necessary when a patient with a new disease appears. Deep learning techniques have stood out in recent years, but they suffer from catastrophic forgetting, i.e., a dramatic decrease in performance when new training classes appear. We found that keeping the feature distribution of a teacher model helps maintain the performance of incremental learning. In this paper, we design a framework named "Attribute Driven Incremental Network" (ADINet), a new architecture that integrates class label prediction and attribute prediction into an incremental learning framework to boost the classification performance. With image-level classification, we apply knowledge distillation (KD) to retain the knowledge of base classes. With attribute prediction, we calculate the weight of each attribute of an image and use these weights for more precise attribute prediction. We designed attribute distillation (AD) loss to retain the information of base class attributes as new classes appear. This incremental learning can be performed multiple times with a moderate drop in performance. The results of an experiment on our private retinal fundus image dataset demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods. For demonstrating the generalization of our proposed method, we test it on the ImageNet-150K-sub dataset and show good performance.