KeepAugment: A Simple Information-Preserving Data Augmentation Approach

Abstract

Data augmentation (DA) is an essential technique for training state-of-the-art deep learning systems. In this paper, we empirically show that the standard data augmentation methods may introduce distribution shift and consequently hurt the performance on unaugmented data during inference. To alleviate this issue, we propose a simple yet effective approach, dubbed KeepAugment, to increase the fidelity of augmented images. The idea is to use the saliency map to detect important regions on the original images and preserve these informative regions during augmentation. This information-preserving strategy allows us to generate more faithful training examples. Empirically, we demonstrate that our method significantly improves upon a number of prior art data augmentation schemes, e.g. AutoAugment, Cutout, random erasing, achieving promising results on image classification, semi-supervised image classification, multi-view multi-camera tracking and object detection.