SalfMix: A Novel Single Image-Based Data Augmentation Technique Using a Saliency Map

Modern data augmentation strategies such as Cutout, Mixup, and CutMix, have achieved good performance in image recognition tasks. Particularly, the data augmentation approaches, such as Mixup and CutMix, that mix two images to generate a mixed training image, could generalize convolutional neural networks better than single image-based data augmentation approaches such as Cutout. We focus on the fact that the mixed image can improve generalization ability, and we wondered if it would be effective to apply it to a single image. Consequently, we propose a new data augmentation method to produce a self-mixed image based on a saliency map, called SalfMix. Furthermore, we combined SalfMix with state-of-the-art two images-based approaches, such as Mixup, SaliencyMix, and CutMix, to increase the performance, called HybridMix. The proposed SalfMix achieved better accuracies than Cutout, and HybridMix achieved state-of-the-art performance on three classification datasets: CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and TinyImageNet-200. Furthermore, HybridMix achieved the best accuracy in object detection tasks on the VOC dataset, in terms of mean average precision.