Deep learning models have a large number of freeparameters that need to be calculated by effective trainingof the models on a great deal of training data to improvetheir generalization performance. However, data obtaining andlabeling is expensive in practice. Data augmentation is one of themethods to alleviate this problem. In this paper, we conduct apreliminary study on how three variables (augmentation method,augmentation rate and size of basic dataset per label) can affectthe accuracy of deep learning for image classification. The studyprovides some guidelines: (1) it is better to use transformationsthat alter the geometry of the images rather than those justlighting and color. (2) 2-3 times augmentation rate is good enoughfor training. (3) the smaller amount of data, the more obviouscontributions could have.
Data augmentation is an effective technique for improving the accuracy of modern image classifiers. However, current data augmentation implementations are manually designed. In this paper, we describe a simple procedure called AutoAugment to automatically search for improved data augmentation policies. In our implementation, we have designed a search space where a policy consists of many sub-policies, one of which is randomly chosen for each image in each mini-batch. A sub-policy consists of two operations, each operation being an image processing function such as translation, rotation, or shearing, and the probabilities and magnitudes with which the functions are applied. We use a search algorithm to find the best policy such that the neural network yields the highest validation accuracy on a target dataset. Our method achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, SVHN, and ImageNet (without additional data). On ImageNet, we attain a Top-1 accuracy of 83.5 which is 0.4 better than the previous record of 83.1 . On CIFAR-10, we achieve an error rate of 1.5 , which is 0.6 better than the previous state-of-the-art. Augmentation policies we find are transferable between datasets. The policy learned on ImageNet transfers well to achieve significant improvements on other datasets, such as Oxford Flowers, Caltech-101, Oxford-IIT Pets, FGVC Aircraft, and Stanford Cars.