When deep learning is applied to visual object recognition, data augmentation
is often used to generate additional training data without extra labeling cost.
It helps to reduce overfitting and increase the performance of the algorithm.
In this paper we investigate if it is possible to use data augmentation as the
main component of an unsupervised feature learning architecture. To that end we
sample a set of random image patches and declare each of them to be a separate
single-image surrogate class. We then extend these trivial one-element classes
by applying a variety of transformations to the initial 'seed' patches. Finally
we train a convolutional neural network to discriminate between these surrogate
classes. The feature representation learned by the network can then be used in
various vision tasks. We find that this simple feature learning algorithm is
surprisingly successful, achieving competitive classification results on
several popular vision datasets (STL-10, CIFAR-10, Caltech-101).Comment: ICLR 2014 workshop track submission (7 pages, 4 figures, 1 table