Foreground Feature Attention Module Based on Unsupervised Saliency Detector for Few-Shot Learning

In recent years, few-shot learning is proposed to solve the problem of lacking samples in deep learning. However, previous works are mainly concentrated on optimizing neural network structures or augmenting the dataset while ignoring the local relationship of the images. Considering that humans pay more attention to the foreground or prominent features of the images during image recognition, we proposed the foreground feature attention module (FFAM) based on an unsupervised saliency detector for few-shot learning. The FFAM consists of two parts: the foreground extraction module and the features attention module. More specifically, we first extract the foreground images by Robust Background Detector (RBD), one of the best unsupervised saliency detectors. Secondly, we employ the same embedding module to extract the features of both original images and foreground images. Finally, we introduce three improvements to enhance the foreground features and make our network focus on the foreground features without losing background information. Our proposed FFAM is more sensitive to the foreground features than previous approaches. Hence, it effectively recognizes those images with similar backgrounds. Extensive experiments are conducted on miniImagenet and tieredImagenet datasets. It is demonstrated that our proposed FFAM greatly improves the accuracy performance over baseline systems for both one-shot and few-shot classification tasks without increasing the network complexity.