Multi-level Metric Learning for Few-shot Image Recognition

Few-shot learning is devoted to training a model on few samples. Recently, the method based on local descriptor metric-learning has achieved great performance. Most of these approaches learn a model based on a pixel-level metric. However, such works can only measure the relations between them on a single level, which is not comprehensive and effective. We argue that if query images can simultaneously be well classified via three distinct level similarity metrics, the query images within a class can be more tightly distributed in a smaller feature space, generating more discriminative feature maps. Motivated by this, we propose a novel Multi-level Metric Learning (MML) method for few-shot learning, which not only calculates the pixel-level similarity but also considers the similarity of part-level features and the similarity of distributions. First, we use a feature extractor to get the feature maps of images. Second, a multi-level metric module is proposed to calculate the part-level, pixel-level, and distribution-level similarities simultaneously. Specifically, the distribution-level similarity metric calculates the distribution distance (i.e., Wasserstein distance, Kullback-Leibler divergence) between query images and the support set, the pixel-level, and the part-level metric calculates the pixel-level and part-level similarities respectively. Finally, the fusion layer fuses three kinds of relation scores to obtain the final similarity score. Extensive experiments on popular benchmarks demonstrate that the MML method significantly outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods.