ContextMix: A context-aware data augmentation method for industrial visual inspection systems

While deep neural networks have achieved remarkable performance, data augmentation has emerged as a crucial strategy to mitigate overfitting and enhance network performance. These techniques hold particular significance in industrial manufacturing contexts. Recently, image mixing-based methods have been introduced, exhibiting improved performance on public benchmark datasets. However, their application to industrial tasks remains challenging. The manufacturing environment generates massive amounts of unlabeled data on a daily basis, with only a few instances of abnormal data occurrences. This leads to severe data imbalance. Thus, creating well-balanced datasets is not straightforward due to the high costs associated with labeling. Nonetheless, this is a crucial step for enhancing productivity. For this reason, we introduce ContextMix, a method tailored for industrial applications and benchmark datasets. ContextMix generates novel data by resizing entire images and integrating them into other images within the batch. This approach enables our method to learn discriminative features based on varying sizes from resized images and train informative secondary features for object recognition using occluded images. With the minimal additional computation cost of image resizing, ContextMix enhances performance compared to existing augmentation techniques. We evaluate its effectiveness across classification, detection, and segmentation tasks using various network architectures on public benchmark datasets. Our proposed method demonstrates improved results across a range of robustness tasks. Its efficacy in real industrial environments is particularly noteworthy, as demonstrated using the passive component dataset.Comment: Accepted to EAA

NICE 2023 Zero-shot Image Captioning Challenge

In this report, we introduce NICE project\footnote{\url{https://nice.lgresearch.ai/}} and share the results and outcomes of NICE challenge 2023. This project is designed to challenge the computer vision community to develop robust image captioning models that advance the state-of-the-art both in terms of accuracy and fairness. Through the challenge, the image captioning models were tested using a new evaluation dataset that includes a large variety of visual concepts from many domains. There was no specific training data provided for the challenge, and therefore the challenge entries were required to adapt to new types of image descriptions that had not been seen during training. This report includes information on the newly proposed NICE dataset, evaluation methods, challenge results, and technical details of top-ranking entries. We expect that the outcomes of the challenge will contribute to the improvement of AI models on various vision-language tasks.Comment: Tech report, project page https://nice.lgresearch.ai