Image Augmentation

Cutout is an image augmentation and regularization technique that randomly masks out square regions of input during training. and can be used to improve the robustness and overall performance of convolutional neural networks. The main motivation for cutout comes from the problem of object occlusion, which is commonly encountered in many computer vision tasks, such as object recognition, tracking, or human pose estimation. By generating new images which simulate occluded examples, we not only better prepare the model for encounters with occlusions in the real world, but the model also learns to take more of the image context into consideration when making decisions

Random Erasing is a data augmentation method for training the convolutional neural network (CNN), which randomly selects a rectangle region in an image and erases its pixels with random values. In this process, training images with various levels of occlusion are generated, which reduces the risk of over-fitting and makes the model robust to occlusion. Random Erasing is parameter learning free, easy to implement, and can be integrated with most of the CNN-based recognition models. Random Erasing is complementary to commonly used data augmentation techniques such as random cropping and flipping, and can be implemented in various vision tasks, such as image classification, object detection, semantic segmentation. In the Albumentations library, there is a generalization of RandomErasing called CoarseDropout, which allows masking an arbitrary number of regions of rectangular shape. It could be applied to images, segmentation masks, and key points. Documentation for CoarseDropout

Fast AutoAugment is an image data augmentation algorithm that finds effective augmentation policies via a search strategy based on density matching, motivated by Bayesian DA. The strategy is to improve the generalization performance of a given network by learning the augmentation policies which treat augmented data as missing data points of training data. However, different from Bayesian DA, the proposed method recovers those missing data points by the exploitation-and-exploration of a family of inference-time augmentations via Bayesian optimization in the policy search phase. This is realized by using an efficient density matching algorithm that does not require any back-propagation for network training for each policy evaluation.

Population Based Augmentation, or PBA, is a data augmentation strategy (PBA), which generates nonstationary augmentation policy schedules instead of a fixed augmentation policy. In PBA we consider the augmentation policy search problem as a special case of hyperparameter schedule learning. It leverages Population Based Training (PBT), a hyperparameter search algorithm which optimizes the parameters of a network jointly with their hyperparameters to maximize performance. The output of PBT is not an optimal hyperparameter configuration but rather a trained model and schedule of hyperparameters. In PBA, we are only interested in the learned schedule and discard the child model result (similar to AutoAugment). This learned augmentation schedule can then be used to improve the training of different (i.e., larger and costlier to train) models on the same dataset. PBT executes as follows. To start, a fixed population of models are randomly initialized and trained in parallel. At certain intervals, an “exploit-and-explore” procedure is applied to the worse performing population members, where the model clones the weights of a better performing model (i.e., exploitation) and then perturbs the hyperparameters of the cloned model to search in the hyperparameter space (i.e., exploration). Because the weights of the models are cloned and never reinitialized, the total computation required is the computation to train a single model times the population size.

We are introducing a universal handwritten image augmentation method that is language-agnostic. This groundbreaking technique can be applied to handwritten images in any language worldwide, marking it as the first of its kind. There are four methods for handwritten images which are ThickOCR, ThinOCR, Elongate OCR, Line Erase OCR.