Modern neural networks are over-parameterized and thus rely on strong regularization such as data augmentation and weight decay to reduce overfitting and improve generalization. The dominant form of data augmentation applies invariant transforms, where the learning target of a sample is invariant to the transform applied to that sample. We draw inspiration from human visual classification studies and propose generalizing augmentation with invariant transforms to soft augmentation where the learning target softens non-linearly as a function of the degree of the transform applied to the sample: e.g., more aggressive image crop augmentations produce less confident learning targets. We demonstrate that soft targets allow for more aggressive data augmentation, offer more robust performance boosts, work with other augmentation policies, and interestingly, produce better calibrated models (since they are trained to be less confident on aggressively cropped/occluded examples). Combined with existing aggressive augmentation strategies, soft target 1) doubles the top-1 accuracy boost across Cifar-10, Cifar-100, ImageNet-1K, and ImageNet-V2, 2) improves model occlusion performance by up to $4\times$, and 3) halves the expected calibration error (ECE). Finally, we show that soft augmentation generalizes to self-supervised classification tasks. Code available at https://github.com/youngleox/soft_augmentation
In this paper, we explore and compare multiple solutions to the problem of data augmentation in image classification. Previous work has demonstrated the effectiveness of data augmentation through simple techniques, such as cropping, rotating, and flipping input images. We artificially constrain our access to data to a small subset of the ImageNet dataset, and compare each data augmentation technique in turn. One of the more successful data augmentations strategies is the traditional transformations mentioned above. We also experiment with GANs to generate images of different styles. Finally, w…
Recently, the vision transformer (ViT) has made breakthroughs in image recognition. Its self-attention mechanism (MSA) can extract discriminative labeling information of different pixel blocks to improve image classification accuracy. However, the classification marks in their deep layers tend to ignore local features between layers. In addition, the embedding layer will be fixed-size pixel blocks. Input network Inevitably introduces additional image noise. To this end, we study a data augmentation vision transformer (DAVT) based on data augmentation and proposes a data augmentation method for…
Vehicle shape information is very important in Intelligent Traffic Systems (ITS). In this paper we present a way to exploit a training data set of vehicles released in different years and captured under different perspectives. Also the efficacy of clustering to enhance the make/model classification is presented. Both steps led to improved classification results and a greater robustness. Deeper convolutional neural network based on ResNet architecture has been designed for the training of the vehicle make/model classification. The unequal class distribution of training data produces an a priori…
Enhancing Ambiguous Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition with Soft Label-based Data Augmentation
Converging Lab, Fujitsu Research of America, Inc.（富士通美国研究有限公司融合实验室）；D3 Center, the University of Osaka（大阪大学D3中心）；Graduate School of Computer Science and Systems Engineering, Kyushu Institute of Technology（九州理工大学计算机科学与系统工程研究生院）
In recent years, one of the most popular techniques in the computer vision community has been the deep learning technique. As a data-driven technique, deep model requires enormous amounts of accurately labelled training data, which is often inaccessible in many real-world applications. A data-space solution is Data Augmentation (DA), that can artificially generate new images out of original samples. Image augmentation strategies can vary by dataset, as different data types might require different augmentations to facilitate model training. However, the design of DA policies has been largely de…
In this paper we propose the use of image pixel position coordinate system to improve image classification accuracy in various applications. Specifically, we hypothesize that the use of pixel coordinates will lead to (a) Resolution invariant performance. Here, by resolution we mean the spacing between the pixels rather than the size of the image matrix. (b) Overall improvement in classification accuracy in comparison with network models trained without local pixel coordinates. This is due to position coordinates enabling the network to learn relationship between parts of objects, mimicking the…
Data augmentation is a key practice in machine learning for improving generalization performance. However, finding the best data augmentation hyperparameters requires domain knowledge or a computationally demanding search. We address this issue by proposing an efficient approach to automatically train a network that learns an effective distribution of transformations to improve its generalization. Using bilevel optimization, we directly optimize the data augmentation parameters using a validation set. This framework can be used as a general solution to learn the optimal data augmentation joint…
University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Facebook AI Research（Facebook人工智能研究院）
Deep networks for visual recognition are known to leverage "easy to recognise" portions of objects such as faces and distinctive texture patterns. The lack of a holistic understanding of objects may increase fragility and overfitting. In recent years, several papers have proposed to address this issue by means of occlusions as a form of data augmentation. However, successes have been limited to tasks such as weak localization and model interpretation, but no benefit was demonstrated on image classification on large-scale datasets. In this paper, we show that, by using a simple technique based …
Deep learning models have a large number of freeparameters that need to be calculated by effective trainingof the models on a great deal of training data to improvetheir generalization performance. However, data obtaining andlabeling is expensive in practice. Data augmentation is one of themethods to alleviate this problem. In this paper, we conduct apreliminary study on how three variables (augmentation method,augmentation rate and size of basic dataset per label) can affectthe accuracy of deep learning for image classification. The studyprovides some guidelines: (1) it is better to use trans…
MoireMix: A Formula-Based Data Augmentation for Improving Image Classification Robustness
National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST)（国立研究开发法人产业技术综合研究所）；Tokyo Denki University（东京电机大学）；Waseda University（早稻田大学）；Fundamental AI Lab, University of Technology Nuremberg（纽伦堡工业大学基础人工智能实验室）；Visual Geometry Group, University of Oxford（牛津大学视觉几何组）
Herein, we present a system for hyperspectral image segmentation that utilizes multiple class--based denoising autoencoders which are efficiently trained. Moreover, we present a novel hyperspectral data augmentation method for labelled HSI data using linear mixtures of pixels from each class, which helps the system with edge pixels which are almost always mixed pixels. Finally, we utilize a deep neural network and morphological hole-filling to provide robust image classification. Results run on the Salinas dataset verify the high performance of the proposed algorithm.
SGD-Mix: Enhancing Domain-Specific Image Classification with Label-Preserving Data Augmentation
Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Cheng Kung University（计算机科学与信息工程系，国立成功大学）；Department of Biomedical Informatics, Harvard Medical School, Harvard University（生物医学信息学系，哈佛医学院，哈佛大学）
Due to the difficulty in acquiring massive task-specific occluded images, the classification of occluded images with deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) remains highly challenging. To alleviate the dependency on large-scale occluded image datasets, we propose a novel approach to improve the classification accuracy of occluded images by fine-tuning the pre-trained models with a set of augmented deep feature vectors (DFVs). The set of augmented DFVs is composed of original DFVs and pseudo-DFVs. The pseudo-DFVs are generated by randomly adding difference vectors (DVs), extracted from a smal…
Tel Aviv University（特拉维夫大学）；The Chaim Sheba Medical Center（柴姆·谢巴医疗中心）；Bar-Ilan University（巴伊兰大学）
In this paper, we present a data augmentation method that generates synthetic medical images using Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). We propose a training scheme that first uses classical data augmentation to enlarge the training set and then further enlarges the data size and its diversity by applying GAN techniques for synthetic data augmentation. Our method is demonstrated on a limited dataset of computed tomography (CT) images of 182 liver lesions (53 cysts, 64 metastases and 65 hemangiomas). The classification performance using only classic data augmentation yielded 78.6% sensitivit…
Goethe University Frankfurt（法兰克福歌德大学）；MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab（麻省理工学院-IBM沃森人工智能实验室）
Recently, a number of new Semi-Supervised Learning methods have emerged. As the accuracy for ImageNet and similar datasets increased over time, the performance on tasks beyond the classification of natural images is yet to be explored. Most Semi-Supervised Learning methods rely on a carefully manually designed data augmentation pipeline that is not transferable for learning on images of other domains. In this work, we propose a Semi-Supervised Learning method that automatically selects the most effective data augmentation policy for a particular dataset. We build upon the Fixmatch method and e…
We present PointAugment, a new auto-augmentation framework that automatically optimizes and augments point cloud samples to enrich the data diversity when we train a classification network. Different from existing auto-augmentation methods for 2D images, PointAugment is sample-aware and takes an adversarial learning strategy to jointly optimize an augmentor network and a classifier network, such that the augmentor can learn to produce augmented samples that best fit the classifier. Moreover, we formulate a learnable point augmentation function with a shape-wise transformation and a point-wise …
Indian Institute of Technology, Varanasi（瓦拉纳西印度理工学院）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）
This work summarizes our submission for the Task 3: Disease Classification of ISIC 2018 challenge in Skin Lesion Analysis Towards Melanoma Detection. We use a novel deep neural network (DNN) ensemble architecture introduced by us that can effectively classify skin lesions by using data-augmentation and bagging to address paucity of data and prevent over-fitting. The ensemble is composed of two DNN architectures: Inception-v4 and Inception-Resnet-v2. The DNN architectures are combined in to an ensemble by using a $1\times1$ convolution for fusion in a meta-learning layer.
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）
Data augmentation is usually adopted to increase the amount of training data, prevent overfitting and improve the performance of deep models. However, in practice, random data augmentation, such as random image cropping, is low-efficiency and might introduce many uncontrolled background noises. In this paper, we propose Weakly Supervised Data Augmentation Network (WS-DAN) to explore the potential of data augmentation. Specifically, for each training image, we first generate attention maps to represent the object's discriminative parts by weakly supervised learning. Next, we augment the image g…
Evaluating Data Augmentation Techniques for Coffee Leaf Disease Classification
National University of Science and Technology POLITEHNICA Bucharest（布加勒斯特理工国立科学技术大学）；National Institute for Research and Development in Informatics - ICI Bucharest（布加勒斯特国家信息学研发研究所（ICI布加勒斯特））；Academy of Romanian Scientists（罗马尼亚科学家学院）
We introduce style augmentation, a new form of data augmentation based on random style transfer, for improving the robustness of convolutional neural networks (CNN) over both classification and regression based tasks. During training, our style augmentation randomizes texture, contrast and color, while preserving shape and semantic content. This is accomplished by adapting an arbitrary style transfer network to perform style randomization, by sampling input style embeddings from a multivariate normal distribution instead of inferring them from a style image. In addition to standard classificat…
State-of-the-art video action classifiers often suffer from overfitting. They tend to be biased towards specific objects and scene cues, rather than the foreground action content, leading to sub-optimal generalization performances. Recent data augmentation strategies have been reported to address the overfitting problems in static image classifiers. Despite the effectiveness on the static image classifiers, data augmentation has rarely been studied for videos. For the first time in the field, we systematically analyze the efficacy of various data augmentation strategies on the video classifica…
Object detection and recognition has been an ongoing research topic for a long time in the field of computer vision. Even in robotics, detecting the state of an object by a robot still remains a challenging task. Also, collecting data for each possible state is also not feasible. In this literature, we use a deep convolutional neural network with SVM as a classifier to help with recognizing the state of a cooking object. We also study how a generative adversarial network can be used for synthetic data augmentation and improving the classification accuracy. The main motivation behind this work …
Learning-Based Biharmonic Augmentation for Point Cloud Classification
Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；State Key Lab of Computer Science, ISCAS（中国科学院软件研究所计算机科学国家重点实验室）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Defence Science and Technology（国防科学与技术组织）；Australian Defence Force（澳大利亚国防军）；University of South Australia（南澳大利亚大学）
In this paper we investigate the benefit of augmenting data with synthetically created samples when training a machine learning classifier. Two approaches for creating additional training samples are data warping, which generates additional samples through transformations applied in the data-space, and synthetic over-sampling, which creates additional samples in feature-space. We experimentally evaluate the benefits of data augmentation for a convolutional backpropagation-trained neural network, a convolutional support vector machine and a convolutional extreme learning machine classifier, usi…
Many-MobileNet: Multi-Model Augmentation for Robust Retinal Disease Classification
School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence, Arizona State University（亚利桑那州立大学计算与增强智能学院）；McKeley School of Engineering, Washington University in St. Louis（圣路易斯华盛顿大学麦凯尔工程学院）；School of Computing, Clemson University（克莱姆森大学计算学院）；Mayo Clinic（梅奥诊所）
Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；Beijing San Kuai Yun Technology Co., Ltd.（北京三快云科技有限公司）
It is a difficult task to classify images with multiple class labels using only a small number of labeled examples, especially when the label (class) distribution is imbalanced. Emotion classification is such an example of imbalanced label distribution, because some classes of emotions like \emph{disgusted} are relatively rare comparing to other labels like {\it happy or sad}. In this paper, we propose a data augmentation method using generative adversarial networks (GAN). It can complement and complete the data manifold and find better margins between neighboring classes. Specifically, we des…
Tables are widely used in documents because of their compact and structured representation of information. In particular, in scientific papers, tables can sum up novel discoveries and summarize experimental results, making the research comparable and easily understandable by scholars. Since the layout of tables is highly variable, it would be useful to interpret their content and classify them into categories. This could be helpful to directly extract information from scientific papers, for instance comparing performance of some models given their paper result tables. In this work, we address …
BSDA: Bayesian Random Semantic Data Augmentation for Medical Image Classification
Chengdu Institute of Computer Application, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院成都计算机应用研究所）；School of Computer Science and Technology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学计算机科学与技术学院）
Pedestrian attribute recognition is an important multi-label classification problem. Although the convolutional neural networks are prominent in learning discriminative features from images, the data imbalance in multi-label setting for fine-grained tasks remains an open problem. In this paper, we propose a new re-sampling algorithm called: data augmentation imbalance (DAI) to explicitly enhance the ability to discriminate the fewer attributes via increasing the proportion of labels accounting for a small part. Fundamentally, by applying over-sampling and under-sampling on the multi-label data…
Toshiba Infrastructure Systems & Solutions Corporation（东芝基础设施系统与解决方案公司）
This report deals with translation invariance of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for automatic target recognition (ATR) from synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery. In particular, the translation invariance of CNNs for SAR ATR represents the robustness against misalignment of target chips extracted from SAR images. To understand the translation invariance of the CNNs, we trained CNNs which classify the target chips from the MSTAR into the ten classes under the condition of with and without data augmentation, and then visualized the translation invariance of the CNNs. According to our resu…
Universidade Federal Fluminense（弗鲁米嫩塞联邦大学）；Hospital Universitário Pedro Ernesto（佩德罗·埃内斯托大学医院）；Universidade Estadual do Rio de Janeiro（里约热内卢州立大学）
Skin cancer is a major public health problem, as is the most common type of cancer and represents more than half of cancer diagnoses worldwide. Early detection influences the outcome of the disease and motivates our work. We investigate the composition of CNN committees and data augmentation for the the ISBI 2017 Melanoma Classification Challenge (named Skin Lesion Analysis towards Melanoma Detection) facing the peculiarities of dealing with such a small, unbalanced, biological database. For that, we explore committees of Convolutional Neural Networks trained over the ISBI challenge training d…
Few-shot classification aims to recognize unseen classes with few labeled samples from each class. Many meta-learning models for few-shot classification elaborately design various task-shared inductive bias (meta-knowledge) to solve such tasks, and achieve impressive performance. However, when there exists the domain shift between the training tasks and the test tasks, the obtained inductive bias fails to generalize across domains, which degrades the performance of the meta-learning models. In this work, we aim to improve the robustness of the inductive bias through task augmentation. Concrete…
Convolutional neural networks (ConvNets) are the actual standard for image recognizement and classification. On the present work we develop a Computer Aided-Diagnosis (CAD) system using ConvNets to classify a x-rays chest images dataset in two groups: Normal and Pneumonia. The study uses ConvNets models available on the PyTorch platform: AlexNet, SqueezeNet, ResNet and Inception. We initially use three training styles: complete from scratch using random initialization, using a pre-trained ImageNet model training only the last layer adapted to our problem (transfer learning) and a pre-trained m…
ETH Zürich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；University Hospital Zürich（苏黎世大学医院）
Supervised deep learning relies on the assumption that enough training data is available, which presents a problem for its application to several fields, like medical imaging. On the example of a binary image classification task (breast cancer recognition), we show that pretraining a generative model for meaningful image augmentation helps enhance the performance of the resulting classifier. By augmenting the data, performance on downstream classification tasks could be improved even with a relatively small training set. We show that this "adversarial augmentation" yields promising results com…
University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学）；Ludwig-Maximilians-Univ. München（慕尼黑大学）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Schön Klinik München Schwabing（慕尼黑施瓦宾 Schön 医院）
While convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been successfully applied to many challenging classification applications, they typically require large datasets for training. When the availability of labeled data is limited, data augmentation is a critical preprocessing step for CNNs. However, data augmentation for wearable sensor data has not been deeply investigated yet. In this paper, various data augmentation methods for wearable sensor data are proposed. The proposed methods and CNNs are applied to the classification of the motor state of Parkinson's Disease patients, which is challenging…
This paper presents our approach to the third YouTube-8M video understanding competition that challenges par-ticipants to localize video-level labels at scale to the pre-cise time in the video where the label actually occurs. Ourmodel is an ensemble of frame-level models such as GatedNetVLAD and NeXtVLAD and various BERT models withtest-time augmentation. We explore multiple ways to ag-gregate BERT outputs as video representation and variousways to combine visual and audio information. We proposetest-time augmentation as shifting video frames to one leftor right unit, which adds variety to the…
Existing methods based on meta-learning predict novel-class labels for (target domain) testing tasks via meta knowledge learned from (source domain) training tasks of base classes. However, most existing works may fail to generalize to novel classes due to the probably large domain discrepancy across domains. To address this issue, we propose a novel adversarial feature augmentation (AFA) method to bridge the domain gap in few-shot learning. The feature augmentation is designed to simulate distribution variations by maximizing the domain discrepancy. During adversarial training, the domain dis…
Deep learning models with large learning capacities often overfit to medical imaging datasets. This is because training sets are often relatively small due to the significant time and financial costs incurred in medical data acquisition and labelling. Data augmentation is therefore often used to expand the availability of training data and to increase generalization. However, augmentation strategies are often chosen on an ad-hoc basis without justification. In this paper, we present an augmentation policy search method with the goal of improving model classification performance. We include in …
Data augmentation is a widely used technique for enhancing the generalization ability of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in image classification tasks. Occlusion is a critical factor that affects on the generalization ability of image classification models. In order to generate new samples, existing data augmentation methods based on information deletion simulate occluded samples by randomly removing some areas in the images. However, those methods cannot delete areas of the images according to their structural features of the images. To solve those problems, we propose a novel data augme…
LinkSprite Technologies（LinkSprite科技公司）；Shenzhen Deepcam Information Technologies（深圳深视信息科技公司）
We present an automatic COVID1-19 diagnosis framework from lung CT images. The focus is on signal processing and classification on small datasets with efforts putting into exploring data preparation and augmentation to improve the generalization capability of the 2D CNN classification models. We propose a unique and effective data augmentation method using multiple Hounsfield Unit (HU) normalization windows. In addition, the original slice image is cropped to exclude background, and a filter is applied to filter out closed-lung images. For the classification network, we choose to use 2D Densen…
Seoul National University（首尔国立大学）；Chung-Ang University（中央大学）；NAVER Clova
Image-mixing augmentations (e.g., Mixup and CutMix), which typically involve mixing two images, have become the de-facto training techniques for image classification. Despite their huge success in image classification, the number of images to be mixed has not been elucidated in the literature: only the naive K-image expansion has been shown to lead to performance degradation. This study derives a new K-image mixing augmentation based on the stick-breaking process under Dirichlet prior distribution. We demonstrate the superiority of our K-image expansion augmentation over conventional two-image…
Deep learning-based construction-site image analysis has recently made great progress with regard to accuracy and speed, but it requires a large amount of data. Acquiring sufficient amount of labeled construction-image data is a prerequisite for deep learning-based construction-image recognition and requires considerable time and effort. In this paper, we propose a "data augmentation" scheme based on generative adversarial networks (GANs) for construction-equipment classification. The proposed method combines a GAN and additional "adversarial training" to stably perform "data augmentation" for…
