Augmenting Image Classifiers Using Data Augmentation Generative Adversarial Networks

Effective training of neural networks requires much data. In the low-data regime, parameters are underdetermined, and learnt networks generalise poorly. Data Augmentation alleviates this by using existing data more effectively, but standard data augmentation produces only limited plausible alternative data. Given the potential to generate a much broader set of augmentations, we design and train a generative model to do data augmentation. The model, based on image conditional Generative Adversarial Networks, uses data from a source domain and learns to take a data item and augment it by generating other within-class data items. As this generative process does not depend on the classes themselves, it can be applied to novel unseen classes. We demonstrate that a Data Augmentation Generative Adversarial Network (DAGAN) augments classifiers well on Omniglot, EMNIST and VGGFace.