TorMentor: Deterministic Dynamic-Path, Data Augmentations With Fractals

Anguelos Nicolaou, Vincent Christlein, Edgar Riba, Jian Shi, Georg Vogeler, Mathias Seuret; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Workshops, 2022, pp. 2707-2711

We propose the use of fractals as mean of efficient data augmentation. Specifically, we employ plasma fractals as a means of adapting global image augmentation transformations into continuous local transforms. We formulate the diamond square algorithm as a cascade of simple convolution operations allowing efficient computation of plasma fractals on the GPU. We present the TorMentor image augmentation framework that is totally modular and deterministic across images and point-clouds. All image augmentation operations can be combined through pipelining and random branching to form flow networks of arbitrary width and depth. We demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed approach with experiments on document image segmentation (binarization) with the DIBCO datasets. The proposed approach demonstrates superior performance to traditional image augmentation techniques. Finally, we use extended synthetic binary text images in a self-supervision regiment and outperform the same model when trained with limited data and simple extensions.