An Unsupervised Hierarchical Feature Learning Framework for One-Shot Image Recognition

One-shot recognition has attracted increasing attention recently, inspired by the fact that human cognitive systems could perform recognition tasks well provided only one or a few labeled training samples, in contrast to the conventional object recognition systems that require a large number of labeled training images. One-shot recognition is a visual classification task, where only one training sample is available for each object category in the target test domain, with the help of prior-knowledge data from the source domain. In this paper, we tackle this challenging one-shot recognition problem under a more exciting setting by using only unlabeled images as prior knowledge, which requires less labeling effort than previous works which adopt fully labeled data and/or a sophisticated attribute table designed by human experts. We propose a novel unsupervised hierarchical feature learning framework to learn a feature pyramid from the prior-knowledge domain. The proposed feature learning method also could be applied across multiple feature spaces. Furthermore, we propose using pyramid-matching kernels to combine multilevel features. Examining the “Animals with Attributes” and Caltech-4 data sets in our one-shot recognition setting, we show that the proposed unsupervised feature learning approach with very limited information could achieve comparable performance to that of supervised ones.