Data Augmentation Methods for Semantic Segmentation-based Mobile Robot Perception System

Data augmentation has become a standard technique for increasing deep learning models’ accuracy and robustness. Different pixel intensity modifications, image transformations, and noise additions represent the most utilized data augmentation methods. In this paper, a comprehensive evaluation of data augmentation techniques for mobile robot perception system is performed. The perception system based on a deep learning model for semantic segmentation is augmented by 17 techniques to obtain better generalization characteristics during the training process. The deep learning model is trained and tested on a custom dataset and utilized in real-time scenarios. The experimental results show the increment of 6.2 in mIoU (mean Intersection over Union) for the best combination of data augmentation strategies

IMPROVING THE ACCURACY OF AN OIL SPILL DETECTION AND CLASSIFICATION MODEL WITH FAKE DATASETS

Deep learning is a popular tool for object detection, including oil spill detection. However, acquiring sufficient data for training deep learning models can be challenging, particularly for offshore oil spill accidents. Data augmentation is an effective solution to this issue. This study proposes a data augmentation method using a conditional-GAN model, specifically Pix2Pix, to generate dummy datasets of oil spills. These datasets were used to train the DaNet model for oil detection and classification. Results show that using the dummy datasets improves the mIoU and f1-score to 2.56% and 1.69%, respectively, and enhances the accuracy of classifying of each oil in the model. This approach not only improves the accuracy of the deep learning model but also presents a direction for data enhancement in detection or segmentation tasks for formless objects, such as oil spills, cracks, water seepage, and mildew

Generating All the Roads to Rome: Road Layout Randomization for Improved Road Marking Segmentation

Road markings provide guidance to traffic participants and enforce safe driving behaviour, understanding their semantic meaning is therefore paramount in (automated) driving. However, producing the vast quantities of road marking labels required for training state-of-the-art deep networks is costly, time-consuming, and simply infeasible for every domain and condition. In addition, training data retrieved from virtual worlds often lack the richness and complexity of the real world and consequently cannot be used directly. In this paper, we provide an alternative approach in which new road marking training pairs are automatically generated. To this end, we apply principles of domain randomization to the road layout and synthesize new images from altered semantic labels. We demonstrate that training on these synthetic pairs improves mIoU of the segmentation of rare road marking classes during real-world deployment in complex urban environments by more than 12 percentage points, while performance for other classes is retained. This framework can easily be scaled to all domains and conditions to generate large-scale road marking datasets, while avoiding manual labelling effort.Comment: presented at ITSC 201

A survey on generative adversarial networks for imbalance problems in computer vision tasks

Any computer vision application development starts off by acquiring images and data, then preprocessing and pattern recognition steps to perform a task. When the acquired images are highly imbalanced and not adequate, the desired task may not be achievable. Unfortunately, the occurrence of imbalance problems in acquired image datasets in certain complex real-world problems such as anomaly detection, emotion recognition, medical image analysis, fraud detection, metallic surface defect detection, disaster prediction, etc., are inevitable. The performance of computer vision algorithms can significantly deteriorate when the training dataset is imbalanced. In recent years, Generative Adversarial Neural Networks (GANs) have gained immense attention by researchers across a variety of application domains due to their capability to model complex real-world image data. It is particularly important that GANs can not only be used to generate synthetic images, but also its fascinating adversarial learning idea showed good potential in restoring balance in imbalanced datasets. In this paper, we examine the most recent developments of GANs based techniques for addressing imbalance problems in image data. The real-world challenges and implementations of synthetic image generation based on GANs are extensively covered in this survey. Our survey first introduces various imbalance problems in computer vision tasks and its existing solutions, and then examines key concepts such as deep generative image models and GANs. After that, we propose a taxonomy to summarize GANs based techniques for addressing imbalance problems in computer vision tasks into three major categories: 1. Image level imbalances in classification, 2. object level imbalances in object detection and 3. pixel level imbalances in segmentation tasks. We elaborate the imbalance problems of each group, and provide GANs based solutions in each group. Readers will understand how GANs based techniques can handle the problem of imbalances and boost performance of the computer vision algorithms