Learning Data Augmentation Strategies for Object Detection

Barret Zoph, Ekin D. Cubuk, Golnaz Ghiasi, Tsung-Yi Lin, Jonathon Shlens, Quoc V. Le ;

Much research on object detection focuses on building better model architectures and detection algorithms. Changing the model architecture, however, comes at the cost of adding more complexity to inference, making models slower. Data augmentation, on the other hand, doesn't add any inference complexity, but is insufficiently studied in object detection for two reasons. First it is more difficult to design plausible augmentation strategies for object detection than for classification, because one must handle the complexity of bounding boxes if geometric transformations are applied. Secondly, data augmentation attracts less research attention perhaps because it is believed to add less value and to transfer poorly compared to advances in network architectures.
This paper serves two main purposes. First, we propose to use AutoAugment to design better data augmentation strategies for object detection because it can address the difficulty of designing them. Second, we use the method to assess the value of data augmentation in object detection and compare it against the value of architectures. Our investigation into data augmentation for object detection identifies two surprising results. First, by changing the data augmentation strategy to our method, AutoAugment for detection, we can improve RetinaNet with a ResNet-50 backbone from 36.7 to 39.0 mAP on COCO, a difference of +2.3mAP. This gain exceeds the gain achieved by switching the backbone from ResNet-50 to ResNet-101 (+2.1mAP), which incurs additional training and inference costs. The second surprising finding is that our strategies found on the COCO dataset transfer well to the PASCAL dataset to improve accuracy by +2.7mAP. These results together with our systematic studies of data augmentation call into question previous assumptions about the role and transferability of architectures versus data augmentation. In particular, changing the augmentation may lead to performance gains that are equally transferable as changing the underlying architecture."