Towards building robust DNN applications: an industrial case study of evolutionary data augmentation

Data augmentation techniques that increase the amount of training data by adding realistic transformations are used in machine learning to improve the level of accuracy. Recent studies have demonstrated that data augmentation techniques improve the robustness of image classification models with open datasets; however, it has yet to be investigated whether these techniques are effective for industrial datasets. In this study, we investigate the feasibility of data augmentation techniques for industrial use. We evaluate data augmentation techniques in image classification and object detection tasks using an industrial in-house graphical user interface dataset. As the results indicate, the genetic algorithm-based data augmentation technique outperforms two random-based methods in terms of the robustness of the image classification model. In addition, through this evaluation and interviews with the developers, we learned following two lessons: data augmentation techniques should (1) maintain the training speed to avoid slowing the development and (2) include extensibility for a variety of tasks.