Use the Detection Transformer as a Data Augmenter

Detection Transformer (DETR) is a Transformer architecture based object detection model. In this paper, we demonstrate that it can also be used as a data augmenter. We term our approach as DETR assisted CutMix, or DeMix for short. DeMix builds on CutMix, a simple yet highly effective data augmentation technique that has gained popularity in recent years. CutMix improves model performance by cutting and pasting a patch from one image onto another, yielding a new image. The corresponding label for this new example is specified as the weighted average of the original labels, where the weight is proportional to the area of the patches. CutMix selects a random patch to be cut. In contrast, DeMix elaborately selects a semantically rich patch, located by a pre-trained DETR. The label of the new image is specified in the same way as in CutMix. Experimental results on benchmark datasets for image classification demonstrate that DeMix significantly outperforms prior art data augmentation methods including CutMix.