Adaptive resonance theory (ART2) characterized by its built-in mechanism of handling the stability-plasticity switching and by the adaptive learning without forgetting informations learned in the past, is based on an unsupervised template matching. We propose an improved tow-stage learning algorithm for aRT2: the original unsupervised learning followed by a new supervised learning. Each of the output nodes, after the unsupervised learning, is labeled according to the category informations to reinforce the template pattern associated with the target output node belonging to the same category some dominant classes from exhausting a finite number of template patterns in ART2 inefficiently. Experimental results on a set of 2545 FLIR images show that the ART2 trained by the two-stage learning algorithm yields better accuracy than the original ART2, regardless of th esize of the network and the methods of evaluating the accuracy. This improvement shows the effectiveness of the two-stage learning process.