FADS: Fourier-Augmentation Based Data-Shunting for Few-Shot Classification

Collecting a substantial number of labeled samples is infeasible in many real-world scenarios, thereby bringing out challenges for supervised classification. The research on Few-Shot Classification (FSC) aims to address this issue. Current FSC methods mainly leverage ideas such as meta-learning, self-supervised learning, and data augmentation. Among them, data augmentation appears to be an extremely efficient approach to alleviate the aforementioned data-deficiency problem. Here, we propose a novel data augmentation based FSC method termed Fourier-Augmentation based Data-Shunting (FADS). FADS mainly contains two operations, namely Fourier-based data augmentation (FDA) and data shunting. (i) Fourier transform has a desirable property for classification tasks: the image’s phase and amplitude components in the frequency domain correspond to its high-level structure (i.e., semantic) and low-level style (i.e., statistic) information, which do not interfere with each other. Inspired by this observation, we design the FDA operation, which changes the amplitude spectrum of the to-be-augmented images to obtain new images of the same category. (ii) Then we design the data shunting operation to cooperate with the FDA to accomplish FSC. Specifically, it splits the augmented data into different groups to get independent, weak decisions and then fuses them to obtain a unified, strong decision. We conduct experiments on four benchmark datasets. Results show that utilizing our method brings a performance gain of 0.3%-2% in terms of classification accuracy, compared with the classical methods.