Emotion classification with data augmentation using generative adversarial networks

It is a difficult task to classify images with multiple class labels using only a small number of labeled examples, especially when the label (class) distribution is imbalanced. Emotion classification is such an example of imbalanced label distribution, because some classes of emotions like disgusted are relatively rare comparing to other labels like happy or sad. In this paper, we propose a data augmentation method using generative adversarial networks (GAN). It can complement and complete the data manifold and find better margins between neighboring classes. Specifically, we design a framework using a CNN model as the classifier and a cycle-consistent adversarial networks (CycleGAN) as the generator. In order to avoid gradient vanishing problem, we employ the least-squared loss as adversarial loss. We also propose several evaluation methods on three benchmark datasets to validate GAN’s performance. Empirical results show that we can obtain 5%–10% increase in the classification accuracy after employing the GAN-based data augmentation techniques.