Few-shot contrastive learning for image classification and its application to insulator identification

This paper presents a novel discriminative Few-shot learning architecture based on batch compact loss. Currently, Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) has achieved reasonably good performance in image recognition. Most existing CNN methods facilitate classifiers to learn discriminating patterns to identify existing categories trained with large samples. However, learning to recognize novel categories from a few examples is a challenging task. To address this, we propose the Residual Compact Network to train a deep neural network to learn hierarchical nonlinear transformations to project image pairs into the same latent feature space, under which the distance of each positive pair is reduced. To better use the commonality of class-level features for category recognition, we develop a batch compact loss to form robust feature representations relevant to a category. The proposed methods are evaluated on several datasets. Experimental evaluations show that our proposed method achieves acceptable results in Few-shot learning.