A Deep Mixed-Image Augmentation Strategy for Few-Shot Image Classification

Abstract

Few-shot image classification suffers from severe data scarcity and unstable generalization. Existing data augmentation strategies still have three major limitations: pixel-level fusion strategies are incompatible with the support–query structure of episodic learning, category selection for cropping-based augmentation is overly simplistic, and most approaches rely on a single augmentation method, limiting robustness. To address these issues, this study proposes a deep mixed data augmentation framework that jointly enhances both the support set and the query set. The method first performs global pixel-level fusion to construct fused support and query sets. A Hopfield network then turns fused-support similarities into a pairing matrix H, which assigns a different-class gallery partner for query-side cropping–mixing. Finally, cropping–mixing produces an enhanced query set for model training. The framework is validated using ResNet18+BDC as the backbone. Experimental results on MiniImageNet demonstrate that the proposed method is competitive in few-shot classification, attaining a five-seed test mean of 73.25%/81.88% under 5-way 1-shot and 5-shot. A single complementary run on FC100 attains 66.63%/77.80% and is not a same-backbone ranking against heterogeneous published protocols.