NOSE Augment: Fast and Effective Data Augmentation Without Searching
Authors: Qingrui Li, Song Xie, Anıl Oymagil, Mustafa Furkan Eseoglu, Ziyin Zhang, CM Lee
Keywords: data augmentation, stochastic policy, multi-stage augmentation
Abstract: Data augmentation has been widely used for enhancing the diversity of training data and model generalization. Different from traditional handcrafted methods, recent research introduced automated search for optimal data augmentation policies and achieved state-of-the-art results on image classification tasks. However, these search-based implementations typically incur high computation cost and long search time because of large search spaces and complex searching algorithms. We revisited automated augmentation from alternate perspectives, such as increasing diversity and manipulating the overall usage of augmented data. In this paper, we present an augmentation method without policy searching called NOSE Augment (NO SEarch Augment). Our method completely skips policy searching; instead, it jointly applies multi-stage augmentation strategy and introduces more augmentation operations on top of a simple stochastic augmentation mechanism. With more augmentation operations, we boost the data diversity of stochastic augmentation; and with the phased complexity driven strategy, we ensure the whole training process converged smoothly to a good quality model. We conducted extensive experiments and showed that our method could match or surpass state-of-the-art results provided by search-based methods in terms of accuracies. Without the need for policy search, our method is much more efficient than the existing AutoAugment series of methods. Besides image classification, we also examine the general validity of our proposed method by applying our method to Face Recognition and Text Detection of the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) problems. The results establish our proposed method as a fast and competitive data augmentation strategy that can be used across various CV tasks.