  The recognition ability of human beings is developed in a progressive way.
Usually, children learn to discriminate various objects from coarse to
fine-grained with limited supervision. Inspired by this learning process, we
propose a simple yet effective model for the Few-Shot Fine-Grained (FSFG)
recognition, which tries to tackle the challenging fine-grained recognition
task using meta-learning. The proposed method, named Pairwise Alignment
Bilinear Network (PABN), is an end-to-end deep neural network. Unlike
traditional deep bilinear networks for fine-grained classification, which adopt
the self-bilinear pooling to capture the subtle features of images, the
proposed model uses a novel pairwise bilinear pooling to compare the nuanced
differences between base images and query images for learning a deep distance
metric. In order to match base image features with query image features, we
design feature alignment losses before the proposed pairwise bilinear pooling.
Experiment results on four fine-grained classification datasets and one generic
few-shot dataset demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms both the
state-ofthe-art few-shot fine-grained and general few-shot methods.
