Between-class Learning for Image Classification

Yuji Tokozume, Yoshitaka Ushiku, Tatsuya Harada

Published 2017-11-28Version 1

In this paper, we propose a novel learning method for image classification called Between-Class learning (BC learning). We generate between-class images by mixing two images belonging to different classes with a random ratio. We then input the mixed image to the model and train the model to output the mixing ratio. BC learning has the ability to impose a constraint on the shape of the feature distributions, and thus the generalization ability is improved. BC learning is originally a method developed for sounds, which can be digitally mixed. Mixing two image data does not appear to make sense; however, we argue that because convolutional neural networks have an aspect of treating input data as waveforms, what works on sounds must also work on images. First, we propose a simple mixing method using internal divisions, which surprisingly proves to significantly improve performance. Second, we propose a mixing method that treats the images as waveforms, which leads to a further improvement in performance. As a result, we achieved 19.4% and 2.26% top-1 errors on ImageNet-1K and CIFAR-10, respectively.