EdgeAugment: Data Augmentation by Fusing and Filling Edge Maps

Data augmentation is an effective technique for improving the accuracy of network. However, current data augmentation can not generate more diverse training data. In this article, we overcome this problem by proposing a novel form of data augmentation to fuse and fill different edge maps. The edge fusion augmentation pipeline consists of four parts. We first use the Sobel operator to extract the edge maps from the training images. Then a simple integrated strategy is used to integrate the edge maps extracted from different images. After that we use an edge fuse GAN (Generative Adversarial Network) to fuse the integrated edge maps to synthesize new edge maps. Finally, an edge filling GAN is used to fill the edge maps to generate new training images. This augmentation pipeline can augment data effectively by making full use of the features from training set. We verified our edge fusion augmentation pipeline on different datasets combining with different edge integrated strategies. Experimental results illustrate a superior performance of our pipeline comparing to the existing work. Moreover, as far as we know, we are the first using GAN to augment data by fusing and filling feature from multiple edge maps.