The Effectiveness of Data Augmentation in Image Classification using Deep Learning
This work addresses data scarcity in image classification for researchers and practitioners, but it is incremental as it builds on existing augmentation methods.
The paper tackled the problem of improving image classification with limited data by comparing traditional and novel data augmentation techniques, finding that neural augmentation, where a neural net learns optimal augmentations, showed promise but had mixed results across datasets.
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, we propose a method to allow a neural net to learn augmentations that best improve the classifier, which we call neural augmentation. We discuss the successes and shortcomings of this method on various datasets.