ChannelAug: A New Approach to Data Augmentation for Improving Image Classification Performance in Uncertain Environments

Hyeok Yoon, Soohan Kang, Ji-Hyeong Han

http://doi.org/10.5626/JOK.2020.47.6.568

We propose a new data augmentation method that works by separating the RGB channels of an image to improve image classification ability in uncertain environments. Many data augmentation methods, using technique such as flipping and cropping, have been used to improve the image classification ability of models. while these data augmentation methods have been effective in improving image classification, they have unperformed in uncertain conditions. To solve this problem, we propose the ChannelSplit that separates and reassembles the RGB channels of an image, along with the Mix ChannelSplit, that adopts the concept of MixUp[1,2] to express more diversity. In this paper, the proposed ChannelSplit and Mix ChannelSplit are called ChannelAug because they only utilize channels and do not perform any other image operations. Also, we compare ChannelAug to other image augmentation methods to prove it enhances robustness and uncertainty measures on image classification.