Few-shot classification aims at recognizing novel categories from low data regimes based on prior knowledge. However, the existing methods for few-shot scene classification have limitations on using few annotated data and do not fully consider the intra-class samples with classification targets in different sizes, which lead to poor feature representation. To address these problems, this study introduces an end-to-end framework called self-supervised contrastive learning-based metric learning network (SCL-MLNet) for few-shot remote sensing (RS) scene classification. On one hand, we weave self-supervised contrastive learning into few-shot classification algorithms through multi-task learning, enabling feature extractors to learn representative image features from few annotated samples. Moreover, we devise a new loss function to train the proposed model end-to-end and speed up the convergence of the model. On the other hand, considering the differences between intra-class samples, we introduce a novel attention module embedded in the feature extractor to fuse multi-scale spatial features from the classification targets in different sizes. In our experiments, SCL-MLNet is evaluated on three public benchmark datasets. The results demonstrate that SCL-MLNet achieves state-of-the-art performance for few-shot remote sensing scene classification.

Optical character recognition (OCR) methods have been applied to diverse tasks, e.g., street view text recognition and document analysis. Recently, zero-shot OCR has piqued the interest of the research community because it considers a practical OCR scenario with unbalanced data distribution. However, there is a lack of benchmarks for evaluating such zero-shot methods that apply a divide-and-conquer recognition strategy by decomposing characters into radicals. Meanwhile, radical recognition, as another important OCR task, also lacks radical-level annotation for model training. In this paper, we construct an ancient Chinese character image dataset that contains both radical-level and character-level annotations to satisfy the requirements of the above-mentioned methods, namely, ACCID, where radical-level annotations include radical categories, radical locations, and structural relations. To increase the adaptability of ACCID, we propose a splicing-based synthetic character algorithm to augment the training samples and apply an image denoising method to improve the image quality. By introducing character decomposition and recombination, we propose a baseline method for zero-shot OCR. The experimental results demonstrate the validity of ACCID and the baseline model quantitatively and qualitatively.

Yang Chi, Fausto Giunchiglia, Daqian Shi, Xiaolei Diao, Chuntao Li, Hao Xu. Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022. 2022.

Recent work in Machine Learning and Computer Vision has highlighted the presence of various types of systematic flaws inside ground truth object recognition benchmark datasets. Our basic tenet is that these flaws are rooted in the many-to-many mappings which exist between the visual information encoded in images and the intended semantics of the labels annotating them. The net consequence is that the current annotation process is largely underspecified, thus leaving too much freedom to the subjective judgment of annotators. In this paper, we propose vTelos, an integrated Natural Language Processing, Knowledge Representation, and Computer Vision methodology whose main goal is to make explicit the (otherwise implicit) intended annotation semantics, thus minimizing the number and role of subjective choices. A key element of vTelos is the exploitation of the WordNet lexico-semantic hierarchy as the main means for providing the meaning of natural language labels and, as a consequence, for driving the annotation of images based on the objects and the visual properties they depict. The methodology is validated on images populating a subset of the ImageNet hierarchy.