An Effective Task Sampling Strategy Based on Category Generation for Fine-Grained Few-Shot Object Recognition

Abstract

The recognition of fine-grained objects is crucial for future remote sensing applications, but this task is faced with the few-shot problem due to limited labeled data. In addition, the existing few-shot learning methods do not consider the unique characteristics of remote sensing objects, i.e., the complex backgrounds and the difficulty of extracting fine-grained features, leading to suboptimal performance. In this study, we developed an improved task sampling strategy for few-shot learning that optimizes the target distribution. The proposed approach incorporates broad category information, where each sample is assigned both a broad and fine category label and converts the target task distribution into a fine-grained distribution. This ensures that the model focuses on extracting fine-grained features for the corresponding broad category. We also introduce a category generation method that ensures the same number of fine-grained categories in each task to improve the model accuracy. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed strategy outperforms the existing object recognition methods. We believe that this strategy has the potential to be applied to fine-grained few-shot object recognition, thus contributing to the development of high-precision remote sensing applications.