The training of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) requires a large
amount of data, stimulating the development of new augmentation methods to
alleviate the challenge. Oftentimes, these methods either fail to produce
enough new data or expand the dataset beyond the original manifold. In this
paper, we propose a new augmentation method that guarantees to keep the new
data within the original data manifold thanks to the optimal transport theory.
The proposed algorithm finds cliques in the nearest-neighbors graph and, at
each sampling iteration, randomly draws one clique to compute the Wasserstein
barycenter with random uniform weights. These barycenters then become the new
natural-looking elements that one could add to the dataset. We apply this
approach to the problem of landmarks detection and augment the available
annotation in both unpaired and in semi-supervised scenarios. Additionally, the
idea is validated on cardiac data for the task of medical segmentation. Our
approach reduces the overfitting and improves the quality metrics beyond the
original data outcome and beyond the result obtained with popular modern
augmentation methods.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables. I.B. and N.B. contributed equally.
D.V.D. is the corresponding autho