The Impact of Data Augmentations on Deep Learning-Based Marine Object Classification in Benthic Image Transects

Data augmentation is an established technique in computer vision to foster the generalization of training and to deal with low data volume. Most data augmentation and computer vision research are focused on everyday images such as traffic data. The application of computer vision techniques in domains like marine sciences has shown to be not that straightforward in the past due to special characteristics, such as very low data volume and class imbalance, because of costly manual annotation by human domain experts, and general low species abundances. However, the data volume acquired today with moving platforms to collect large image collections from remote marine habitats, like the deep benthos, for marine biodiversity assessment and monitoring makes the use of computer vision automatic detection and classification inevitable. In this work, we investigate the effect of data augmentation in the context of taxonomic classification in underwater, i.e., benthic images. First, we show that established data augmentation methods (i.e., geometric and photometric transformations) perform differently in marine image collections compared to established image collections like the Cityscapes dataset, showing everyday traffic images. Some of the methods even decrease the learning performance when applied to marine image collections. Second, we propose new data augmentation combination policies motivated by our observations and compare their effect to those proposed by the AutoAugment algorithm and can show that the proposed augmentation policy outperforms the AutoAugment results for marine image collections. We conclude that in the case of small marine image datasets, background knowledge, and heuristics should sometimes be applied to design an effective data augmentation method.