Shape Matters: Few-Shot Object Classification From High-Information Contour Features

A key challenge in visual object recognition is developing models that generalize from limited data while maintaining transparency in their decision making. We propose a biologically inspired model that addresses both issues by classifying images based on transformation-invariant local shape key features. Following the principles of the brain's what and where pathways, each feature is encoded by an image patch and its relative location in polar coordinates, enabling interpretable and robust comparisons between inputs and class prototypes. To mimic human concept learning, prototypes are selected using clustering, improving representativeness and generalization. Results show that our model achieves human-comparable performance, with an error rate between 1% and 2% on the MNIST data set when all training images are used as prototypes. In data-limited scenarios, where only a small number of prototypes are selected, our model consistently outperforms convolutional neural networks (CNNs). To evaluate out-of-distribution generalization, we use prototypes from MNIST and test both models on the ETL-1 data set, which differs in data distribution. Although CNN accuracy drops significantly under these conditions, our model maintains high accuracy, even with few prototypes, demonstrating strong robustness and greater capacity to generalize to unseen distributions, bringing it closer to human-like recognition capabilities.