Background Invariance By Adversarial Learning

Convolutional neural networks are shown to be vulnerable to changes in the background. The proposed method is an end-to-end method that augments the training set by introducing new backgrounds during the training process. These backgrounds are created by a generative network that is trained as an adversary to the model. A case study is explored based on overhead power line insulators detection using a drone - a training set is prepared from photographs taken inside a laboratory and then evaluated using photographs that are harder to collect from outside the laboratory. The proposed method improves performance by over 20% for this case study.