Attribute Mix: Semantic Data Augmentation for Fine Grained Recognition

Collecting fine-grained labels usually requires expert-level domain knowledge and is prohibitive to scale up. In this paper, we propose Attribute Mix, a data augmentation strategy at attribute level to expand the fine-grained samples. The principle lies in that attribute features are shared among fine-grained sub-categories, and can be seamlessly transferred among images. Toward this goal, we propose an automatic attribute mining approach to discover attributes that belong to the same supercategory, and Attribute Mix is operated by mixing semantically meaningful attribute features from two images. Attribute Mix is a simple but effective data augmentation strategy that can significantly improve the recognition performance without increasing the inference budgets. Extensive experiments and ablation studies show that the proposed method consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on challenging benchmarks including CUB-200-2011, FGVC-Aircraft, and Stanford Cars.