FaNet: Feature-aware network for few shot classification of strip steel surface defects

•A novel feature-aware network (FaNet) is proposed, which is applied to few-shot classification for strip steel surface defects.•Two feature-aware modules can effectively extract and enhance the high-dimensional feature information from a few image data.•The first publicly available few-shot classification dataset with large-scale strip steel surface defects is constructed (FSC-20).