Increasing image segmentation accuracy on small datasets by merging multiple inferences on augmented images

Supervised machine learning depends on training a model to mimic previous labeled results. The problem with a small dataset is that data augmentation is necessary to increase the generalization of the model to future images, but we have observed that future images won't necessarily be in the same domain as the augmented images. To alleviate this problem we applied image segmentation multiple times on the same image by using the same data augmentation techniques on the image in question, and then we merged the results using a priority based on the class weights used when training the model. Merging the segmentation results from the augmented images increased the mean-intersection-over-union over the inference results that used a single image.