Context Augmentation for Convolutional Neural Networks

Recent enhancements of deep convolutional neural networks (ConvNets) empowered by enormous amounts of labeled data have closed the gap with human performance for many object recognition tasks. These impressive results have generated interest in understanding and visualization of ConvNets. In this work, we study the effect of background in the task of image classification. Our results show that changing the backgrounds of the training datasets can have drastic effects on testing accuracies. Furthermore, we enhance existing augmentation techniques with the foreground segmented objects. The findings of this work are important in increasing the accuracies when only a small dataset is available, in creating datasets, and creating synthetic images.