Few-Shot Fine-Grained Image Classification with Progressively Feature Refinement and Continuous Relationship Modeling

Recently, a number of effective methods have been proposed to tackle the challenging task of Few-Shot Fine-Grained Image Classification (FS-FGIC). However, how to fully leverage the backbone network to discover and extract detailed features to generate more discriminative class prototypes, as well as how to accurately model the similarity relationship between query samples and the class prototypes, are still issues to be further considered. Therefore, we propose a novel progreSsively featUre refInement and conTinuous rElationship moDeling method, SUITED for short, to address these two issues existing in the State-of-the-Art FS-FGIC methods. Specifically, we design the Progressive Feature Refinement Module (PFRM) to fully exploit the backbone network's progressive feature extraction capabilities, forming multi-scale feature representations to further enhance discriminative features. Then, the Continuous Relationship Modeling Module (CRMM) is proposed to capture the dependencies between query samples and the corresponding class prototypes, achieving precise optimization of the distances among corresponding sample points in the feature space. We conducted extensive experiments on five fine-grained benchmark datasets, and the experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is comprehensively ahead of the existing State-of-the-Art methods.