Abstract
Data augmentation is an efficient way to reduce overfitting on models and to improve a performance supplementing extra data for training. It is more important in deep learning based industrial machine vision. Because deep learning requires huge scale of learning data to learn a model, but acquisition of data can be limited in most of industrial applications. A very generic method for augmenting image data is to perform geometric transformations, such as cropping, rotating, translating and adjusting brightness of the image. The effectiveness of data augmentation in image classification has been reported, but it is rare in defect inspections. We explore and compare various basic augmenting operations for the metal surface defects. The experiments were executed for various types of defects and different CNN networks and analysed for performance improvements by the data augmentations.