markroxor
commented
7 years ago Our neural network architecture has 60 million parameters. Although the 1000 classes of ILSVRC make each training example impose 10 bits of constraint on the mapping from image to label, this turns out to be insufficient to learn so many parameters without considerable overfitting. Below, we describe the two primary ways in which we combat overfitting.
The first form of data augmentation consists of generating image translations and horizontal reflections. We do this by extracting random 224 × 224 patches (and their horizontal reflections) from the 256×256 images and training our network on these extracted patches4 . This increases the size of our training set by a factor of 2048, though the resulting training examples are, of course, highly interdependent. Without this scheme, our network suffers from substantial overfitting, which would have forced us to use much smaller networks. At test time, the network makes a prediction by extracting five 224 × 224 patches (the four corner patches and the center patch) as well as their horizontal reflections (hence ten patches in all), and averaging the predictions made by the network’s softmax layer on the ten patches.
The second form of data augmentation consists of altering the intensities of the RGB channels in training images. Specifically, we perform PCA on the set of RGB pixel values throughout the ImageNet training set. To each training image, we add multiples of the found principal components,with magnitudes proportional to the corresponding eigenvalues times a random variable drawn from a Gaussian with mean zero and standard deviation 0.1. Therefore to each RGB image pixel Ixy = [IR xy, IG xy, IB xy]T we add the following quantity: [p1, p2, p3][α1λ1, α2λ2, α3λ3]T where pi and λi are ith eigenvector and eigenvalue of the 3 × 3 covariance matrix of RGB pixel values, respectively, and αi is the aforementioned random variable. Each αi is drawn only once for all the pixels of a particular training image until that image is used for training again, at which point it is re-drawn. This scheme approximately captures an important property of natural images, namely, that object identity is invariant to changes in the intensity and color of the illumination. This scheme reduces the top-1 error rate by over 1%.
Alexnet 2012 paper