Mixed Color Channels (MCC): A Universal Module for Mixed Sample Data Augmentation Methods

Yang Wei, Jianfeng Ma, Zhongyuan Jiang, Bin Xiao

Abstract: Color invariance is critical for computer vision systems since it significantly increases the robustness and effectiveness of the system. MSDA approaches (e.g., FMix and CutMix) have attracted considerable attention in recent years since they are simple, effective, and do not require extra computation con-sumption. By mixing samples, these approaches extend the distribution of training samples. However, the color information of these mixed samples is not changed, which makes it still difficult for trained models to achieve color invariance. To address this issue, we propose a universal module called Mixed Color Channels (MCC) that implements color changes by mixing the sample and its color variants, which enables trained models to achieve color invariance. In the experimen-tal section, we insert MCC into four state-of-the-art MSDA approaches, evaluate its effectiveness, and embed MCC into a non-MSDA method to demonstrate its extensibility.