CDFM: A cross‐domain few‐shot model for marine plankton classification

Abstract

Marine plankton classification is important for monitoring marine biological populations and understanding marine ecosystems. However, it is difficult to obtain abundant annotated image data of marine plankton to train classification models of high quality. To classify marine plankton with a small number of image samples, a cross-domain few-shot learning model (CDFM) is proposed. First, CDFM learns knowledge from existing labelled images and then transfers the knowledge to new images. In this process, there is an issue of domain differences between the new images and the existing datasets due to differences in data acquisition time and locations. To address this issue, the authors pre-train a model in the source domain and then use fine-tuning to adapt it to the target domain. Second, the graph neural network is used as a meta-learning module to learn a feature distance metric for marine plankton classification with limited samples. Extensive experiments on four marine plankton image datasets are conducted, including Kaggle Plankton, miniPPlankton, ZooScan and WHOI, and CDFM outperforms existing methods for marine plankton classification.