Self-reconstruction network for fine-grained few-shot classification

Metric-based methods are one of the most common methods to solve the problem of few-shot image classification. However, traditional metric-based few-shot methods suffer from overfitting and local feature misalignment. The recently proposed feature reconstruction-based approach, which reconstructs query image features from the support set features of a given class and compares the distance between the original query features and the reconstructed query features as the classification criterion, effectively solves the feature misalignment problem. However, the issue of overfitting still has not been considered. To this end, we propose a self-reconstruction metric module for diversifying query features and a restrained cross-entropy loss for avoiding over-confident predictions. By introducing them, the proposed self-reconstruction network can effectively alleviate overfitting. Extensive experiments on five benchmark fine-grained datasets demonstrate that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on both 5-way 1-shot and 5-way 5-shot classification tasks.