Few-Shot Learning Pipeline for Monkeypox Skin Disease Classification Using CNN Feature Extractors

TL;DR

This paper introduces a few-shot learning pipeline using lightweight CNNs and SimpleShot for Monkeypox skin disease classification, enabling effective recognition with limited labeled data and benchmarking multiple CNN backbones.

Contribution

The study systematically evaluates CNN feature extractors with a non-parametric few-shot classifier for Monkeypox detection, highlighting MobileNetV2_100's superior performance and domain robustness.

Findings

MobileNetV2_100 achieves highest accuracy among tested models.

Binary Monkeypox-vs-Others transfer remains stable across datasets.

Multi-class classification performance drops under domain shift.

Abstract

Despite the strong performance of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) in disease classification, their effectiveness often depends on access to large annotated datasets, which is an impractical requirement for emerging or rare conditions such as Monkeypox. To overcome this limitation, we propose a few-shot learning (FSL) framework that employs SimpleShot, a lightweight, non-parametric, inductive classifier, for Monkeypox and pox-like skin disease recognition from limited labeled examples. The proposed pipeline passes the skin lesion images through a frozen, pretrained CNN backbone to obtain feature embeddings, which are then classified via SimpleShot using nearest-centroid comparisons in a normalized embedding space. We systematically benchmark six widely used CNN backbones as feature extractors under consistent experimental settings, enabling fair comparison. Experiments on three publicly available datasets (MSLD v1.0, MSID, and MSLD v2.0) are conducted across 2-way, 4-way, and 6-way tasks with 1-shot, 5-shot, and 10-shot configurations. Among all models, MobileNetV2_100 consistently achieves the highest accuracy. In addition, we present a cross-dataset evaluation for Monkeypox classification, revealing that binary Mpox-vs-Others transfer remains comparatively stable while multi-class performance degrades significantly under domain shift. Together, these results demonstrate the practical utility of combining inductive FSL methods with lightweight CNN backbones and highlight the importance of domain robustness for reliable real-world clinical deployment.