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MCS: a metric confidence selection framework for few shot image classification

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Abstract

In the field of image classification, few shot learning (FSL) is to identify the new samples for each category using the extremely limited data. Due to lacking of data, FSL was usually performed by optimizing network or searching for new measurement methods. However, these mechanisms may fail to obtain enough information from the limited test data and then lack of learning ability. To address this problem, we attempt to obtain more information from the unlabeled data using the pseudo labels. In order to improve the reliability of selecting pseudo label data, we propose a new sample selection strategy, named Metric Confidence Selection (MCS), which is more conducive to select the most reliable pseudo-label data. In addition, we propose a new framework to combine our MCS and metric learning together. Our framework tends to get more information from the unlabeled samples, which is helpful to improve utilization efficiency. Extensive experiments on four widely-used benchmark datasets show that our proposed method surpass most state-of-the-art ones in few shot image classification.

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Funding

This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 62171314), and the recipient of the support was Kai He.

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Conceptualization: [Lei Wang] and [Kai He]; methodology: [Lei Wang]; software: [Lei Wang]; validation: [Lei Wang] and [Kai He]; formal analysis: [Lei Wang]; investigation: [Zikang Liu]; resources: [Zikang Liu]; data curation: [Zikang Liu]; writing-original draft preparation: [Lei Wang]; writing-review and editing: [Kai He]; supervision: [Kai He]; project administration: [Kai He]; funding acquisition: [Kai He].”; All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript

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Correspondence to Kai He.

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Wang, L., He, K. & Liu, Z. MCS: a metric confidence selection framework for few shot image classification. Multimed Tools Appl 83, 10865–10880 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-023-15892-y

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