Frozen Feature Augmentation for Few-Shot Image Classification

Training a linear classifier or lightweight model on top of pretrained vision model outputs so-called 'frozen features' leads to impressive performance on a number of downstream few-shot tasks. Currently frozen features are not modified during training. On the other hand when networks are trained directly on images data augmentation is a standard recipe that improves performance with no substantial overhead. In this paper we conduct an extensive pilot study on few-shot image classification that explores applying data augmentations in the frozen feature space dubbed 'frozen feature augmentation (FroFA)' covering twenty augmentations in total. Our study demonstrates that adopting a deceptively simple pointwise FroFA such as brightness can improve few-shot performance consistently across three network architectures three large pretraining datasets and eight transfer datasets.