Welcome back! You've successfully learned how to preprocess your dataset by cleaning, normalizing, and splitting it into training and testing sets. Now, it's time to take your data preparation skills to the next level with data augmentation. This lesson will guide you through the process of enhancing your dataset, making your model more robust and capable of recognizing drawings more accurately.

In this lesson, you'll discover how to implement data augmentation using the Keras ImageDataGenerator. Data augmentation is a technique that artificially expands the size of your training dataset by creating modified versions of images. This is crucial for improving the performance of your model, especially when working with limited data.

Note: Data augmentation is typically applied only to the training set, not the validation or test sets. This ensures that your model is evaluated on unaltered data, providing a true measure of its performance.

Here's a sneak peek at the code you'll be working with:

This output shows that the generator produces a batch of 32 augmented images, each with the same shape as your original training images (for example, 28x28 pixels with 1 color channel for grayscale).

This code snippet demonstrates how to set up and use the ImageDataGenerator to augment your training data. You'll learn how to apply various transformations, such as rotation, shifting, and flipping, to create a more diverse dataset.

Here’s what each parameter in ImageDataGenerator does and how it helps your model generalize:

• rotation_range=10: Randomly rotates images by up to 10 degrees. This helps the model recognize drawings even if they are slightly rotated.
• width_shift_range=0.1: Shifts images horizontally by up to 10% of the width. This teaches the model to handle drawings that are not perfectly centered.
• height_shift_range=0.1: Shifts images vertically by up to 10% of the height. This helps the model learn from drawings that are higher or lower in the frame.
• shear_range=0.1: Applies shearing transformations (slanting the image). This exposes the model to skewed versions of drawings.
• zoom_range=0.1: Randomly zooms in or out by up to 10%. This helps the model recognize objects at different scales.
• horizontal_flip=True: Randomly flips images horizontally. This is useful if the orientation of the drawing doesn’t matter, making the model robust to left-right variations.
• fill_mode='nearest': Determines how to fill in new pixels that are created after a transformation. Using 'nearest' copies the nearest pixel value, which helps preserve the drawing’s structure after augmentation.

After that we perform fit and flow operations:

• datagen.fit(x_train): Calculates any statistics required for certain augmentations (like feature-wise normalization or ZCA whitening) based on the training data. For basic augmentations, this step can be included for consistency, even if not strictly necessary.
• datagen.flow(x_train, y_train, batch_size=32): Creates an iterator that generates batches of augmented image and label pairs on the fly, applying random transformations to each batch during training.

Data augmentation is a powerful tool in machine learning that helps improve model generalization. By introducing variations in your training data, you can make your model more resilient to changes and distortions in real-world data. This is especially important in drawing recognition, where the same object can be drawn in many different ways. By the end of this lesson, you'll be equipped with the skills to enhance your dataset and boost your model's performance.

Excited to get started? Let's dive into the practice section and see data augmentation in action!