Generating training images with different angles by GAN for improving grocery product image recognition

Image recognition based on deep learning methods has gained remarkable achievements by feeding with abundant training data. Unfortunately, collecting a tremendous amount of annotated images is time-consuming and expensive, especially in grocery product recognition tasks. It is challenging to recognise grocery products accurately when the deep learning model is trained with insufficient data. This paper proposes multi-angle Generative Adversarial Networks (MAGAN), which can generate realistic training images with different angles for data augmentation. Mutual information is employed in the novel GAN to achieve the learning of angles in an unsupervised manner. This paper aims to create training images containing grocery products from different angles, thus improving grocery product recognition accuracy. We first enlarge the fruit dataset by using MAGAN and the state-of-the-art GAN variants. Then, we compare the top-1 accuracy results from CNN classifiers trained with different data augmentation methods. Finally, our experiments demonstrate that the MAGAN exceeds the existing GANs for grocery product recognition tasks, obtaining a significant increase in the accuracy.