An improved hide-and-seek augmentation technique for image classification using convolutional neural networks

In various machine learning tasks, including image classification, data augmentation is widely used to expand the training dataset and prevent overfitting. In traditional data augmentation techniques, images from training data are flipped, distorted, added with some noise, or cropped to create new samples from the original images. This paper presents an improved and more effective data augmentation technique for image classification tasks, called Flip-and-Hide (FnH). Our technique was validated on four well-known datasets, MNIST, FMNIST, CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100. We found 0.03% and 0.12% improvements on FMNIST and CIFAR-10, respectively, compared to the conventional Hide-and-Seek (HaS) augmentation technique. Moreover, we demonstrated the superiority of the proposed FnH augmentation technique by performing some visualisations. Consequently, our technique is particularly useful for image classification tasks that require limited training data.