Training a good deep learning model often requires a lot of annotated data. As a large amount of labeled data is typically difficult to collect and even more difficult to annotate, data augmentation and data generation are widely used in the process of training deep neural networks. However, there is no clear common understanding on how much labeled data is needed to get satisfactory performance. In this paper, we try to address such a question using vehicle license plate character recognition as an example application. We apply computer graphic scripts and Generative Adversarial Networks to generate and augment a large number of annotated, synthesized license plate images with realistic colors, fonts, and character composition from a small number of real, manually labeled license plate images. Generated and augmented data are mixed and used as training data for the license plate recognition network modified from DenseNet. The experimental results show that the model trained from the generated mixed training data has good generalization ability, and the proposed approach achieves a new state-of-the-art accuracy on Dataset-1 and AOLP, even with a very limited number of original real license plates. In addition, the accuracy improvement caused by data generation becomes more significant when the number of labeled images is reduced. Data augmentation also plays a more significant role when the number of labeled images is increased.
Generative adversarial networks(GANs) @cite_9 @cite_12 train a generator and discriminator alternatively. The output of the discriminator acts as a generator's loss function. @cite_14 propose Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks(CycleGAN), which learns the mapping relationship from one domain to another and is mainly used for the style conversion of pictures. Wasserstein GANs(WGAN) @cite_13 are proposed to improve the stability of GAN training. Applying Wasserstein loss to CycleGAN, creating CycleWGAN, also improves its training stability in @cite_15 . Gradient penalties in WGAN(WGAN-GP) @cite_18 are proposed to solve the WGAN generator weight distribution problem.
@cite_18 @cite_14 @cite_9 @cite_15 @cite_13 @cite_12
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Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are powerful generative models, but suffer from training instability. The recently proposed Wasserstein GAN (WGAN) makes progress toward stable training of GANs, but sometimes can still generate only low-quality samples or fail to converge. We find that these problems are often due to the use of weight clipping in WGAN to enforce a Lipschitz constraint on the critic, which can lead to undesired behavior. We propose an alternative to clipping weights: penalize the norm of gradient of the critic with respect to its input. Our proposed method performs better than standard WGAN and enables stable training of a wide variety of GAN architectures with almost no hyperparameter tuning, including 101-layer ResNets and language models over discrete data. We also achieve high quality generations on CIFAR-10 and LSUN bedrooms. We propose a new framework for estimating generative models via an adversarial process, in which we simultaneously train two models: a generative model G that captures the data distribution, and a discriminative model D that estimates the probability that a sample came from the training data rather than G. The training procedure for G is to maximize the probability of D making a mistake. This framework corresponds to a minimax two-player game. In the space of arbitrary functions G and D, a unique solution exists, with G recovering the training data distribution and D equal to ½ everywhere. In the case where G and D are defined by multilayer perceptrons, the entire system can be trained with backpropagation. There is no need for any Markov chains or unrolled approximate inference networks during either training or generation of samples. Experiments demonstrate the potential of the framework through qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the generated samples. Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) have attracted much research attention recently, leading to impressive results for natural image generation. However, to date little success was observed in using GAN generated images for improving classification tasks. Here we attempt to explore, in the context of car license plate recognition, whether it is possible to generate synthetic training data using GAN to improve recognition accuracy. With a carefully-designed pipeline, we show that the answer is affirmative. First, a large-scale image set is generated using the generator of GAN, without manual annotation. Then, these images are fed to a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) followed by a bidirectional recurrent neural network (BRNN) with long short-term memory (LSTM), which performs the feature learning and sequence labelling. Finally, the pre-trained model is fine-tuned on real images. Our experimental results on a few data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of using GAN images: an improvement of 7.5 over a strong baseline with moderate-sized real data being available. We show that the proposed framework achieves competitive recognition accuracy on challenging test datasets. We also leverage the depthwise separate convolution to construct a lightweight convolutional RNN, which is about half size and 2x faster on CPU. Combining this framework and the proposed pipeline, we make progress in performing accurate recognition on mobile and embedded devices. In recent years, supervised learning with convolutional networks (CNNs) has seen huge adoption in computer vision applications. Comparatively, unsupervised learning with CNNs has received less attention. In this work we hope to help bridge the gap between the success of CNNs for supervised learning and unsupervised learning. We introduce a class of CNNs called deep convolutional generative adversarial networks (DCGANs), that have certain architectural constraints, and demonstrate that they are a strong candidate for unsupervised learning. Training on various image datasets, we show convincing evidence that our deep convolutional adversarial pair learns a hierarchy of representations from object parts to scenes in both the generator and discriminator. Additionally, we use the learned features for novel tasks - demonstrating their applicability as general image representations.