Data Augmentation with Generative Adversarial Networks for Grocery Product Image Recognition

Image recognition tasks have gained enormous progress with a tremendous amount of training data. However, it isn't easy to obtain such training datasets that contain numerous annotated images in the domain of grocery product recognition. A small number of training data always results in a less than stellar recognition accuracy. Here we attempt to address this challenge by using generative adversarial networks (GAN), which can generate natural images for data augmentation. This paper aims to investigate the feasibility of using GAN to create synthetic training data, and thus to improve grocery product recognition accuracy. In this work, different GAN variants and image rotation are employed to enlarge the fruit datasets. Then, we train the CNN classifier using different data augmentation methods and compare the top-1 accuracy results. Finally, our experiments demonstrate that Auxiliary Classifier GAN (ACGAN) has achieved the best performance, which obtains 1.26%similar to 3.44% increase in recognition accuracy. As an additional contribution, the results show that the effectiveness of using generated data is very close to that of using real data, which in our best experimental case, are 93.85% and 94.25%, respectively.